ing her head over the
imprisoned arm.

"Your unseemly levity, Margaret, makes it necessary for me to
defer my remarks on natural phenomena until some more fitting
occasion."

"Oh, Richard, don't let an atmospherical change come over
_you!"_

"When you knocked at my door, months ago," said Richard, "I didn't
dream you were such a satirical little piece, or may be you wouldn't
have got in. You stood there as meek as Moses, with your frock
reaching only to the tops of your boots. You were a deception,
Margaret."

"I was dreadfully afraid of you, Richard."

"You are not afraid of me nowadays."

"Not a bit."

"You are showing your true colors. That long dress, too! I believe
the train has turned your head."

"But just now you said you admired it."

"So I did, and do. It makes you look quite like a woman, though."

"I want to be a woman. I would like to be as old--as old as Mrs.
Methuselah. Was there a Mrs. Methuselah?"

"I really forget," replied Richard, considering. "But there must
have been. The old gentleman had time enough to have several. I
believe, however, that history is rather silent about his domestic
affairs."

"Well, then," said Margaret, after thinking it over, "I would like
to be as old as the youngest Mrs. Methuselah."

"That was probably the last one," remarked Richard, with great
profundity. "She was probably some giddy young thing of seventy or
eighty. Those old widowers never take a wife of their own age. I
shouldn't want you to be seventy, Margaret,--or even eighty."

"On the whole, perhaps, I shouldn't fancy it myself. Do you
approve of persons marrying twice?"

"N--o, not at the same time."

"Of course I didn't mean that," said Margaret, with asperity. "How
provoking you can be!"

"But they used to,--in the olden time, don't you know?"

"No, I don't."

Richard burst out laughing. "Imagine him," he cried,--"imagine
Methuselah in his eight or nine hundredth year, dressed in his
customary bridal suit, with a sprig of century-plant stuck in his
button-hole!"

"Richard," said Margaret solemnly, "you shouldn't speak jestingly
of a scriptural character."

At this Richard broke out again. "But gracious me!" he exclaimed,
suddenly checking himself. "I am forgetting you all this while!"

Richard hurriedly reversed the mass of plaster on the table, and
released Margaret's half-petrified fingers. They were shriveled and
colorless with the cold.

"There isn't any feeling in it wha