now."

"What other side? I _don't_ know."

"Well, you'd have had to laugh yourself, if you'd seen the lordly way he
dismissed the poor people who had come running out of their houses to
help him, and his stateliness in rewarding that little cooper, and his
heroic parting from his cherished overcoat,--which of course he can't
replace in Quebec,--and his absent-minded politeness in taking my hand
under his arm, and marching off with me so magnificently. But the worst
thing, Fanny,"--and she bowed herself under a tempest of long-pent
mirth,--"the worst thing was, that the iron, you know, was the cooper's
branding-iron, and I had a vision of the dog carrying about on his nose,
as long as he lived, the monogram that marks the cooper's casks as
holding a certain number of gallons--"

"Kitty, don't be--sacrilegious!" cried Mrs. Ellison.

"No, I'm not," she retorted, gasping and panting. "I never respected Mr.
Arbuton so much, and you say yourself I haven't shown myself so careful
of him before. But I never was so glad to see Dick in my life, and to
have some excuse for laughing. I didn't dare to speak to Mr. Arbuton
about it, for he couldn't, if he had tried, have let me laugh it out and
be done with it. I trudged demurely along by his side, and neither of us
mentioned the matter to Dick," she concluded breathlessly. Then, "I
don't know why I should tell you now; it seems wicked and cruel," she
said penitently, almost pensively.

Mrs. Ellison had not been amused. She said, "Well, Kitty, in _some_
girls I should say it was quite heartless to do as you've done."

"It's heartless in _me_, Fanny; and you needn't say such a thing. I'm
sure I didn't utter a syllable to wound him, and just before that he'd
been _very_ disagreeable, and I forgave him because I thought he was
mortified. And you needn't say that I've no feeling"; and thereupon she
rose, and, putting her hands into her cousin's, "Fanny," she cried,
vehemently, "I _have_ been heartless. I'm afraid I haven't shown any
sympathy or consideration. I'm afraid I must have seemed dreadfully
callous and hard. I oughtn't to have thought of anything but the danger
to him; and it seems to me now I scarcely thought of that at all. O, how
rude it was of me to see anything funny in it! What _can_ I do?"

"Don't go crazy, at any rate, Kitty. _He_ doesn't know that you've been
laughing about him. You needn't do anything."

"O yes, I need. He doesn't know that I've been laughing a