may eat it with that last wafer!"

"How you do run on!" merely remarked Bell, who probably enjoyed the wild
girl's conversation quite as much as she was capable of enjoying
anything.

"Yes," said Joe, "and I should like to know any reason for stopping, at
least before our impressed beau comes back. Has he gone off to make
arrangements with the fortune-teller, I wonder, so as to play a trick
upon us when we get there?"

"Eh," said Bell, a little startled, "could such a trick be possible!"

"Very possible, my dear!" said Joe. "I'll warrant such things have been
done, and my gentleman looks just mischievous enough. But no--he would
not _dare_ do such a thing, for he could see with half an eye that if he
did I should one day pay him for it!"

"If you ever had a chance!" remarked Bell with some approach to a sneer.

"Oh," said Joe. "Trust me for that! Didn't I just tell you that I had
half made up my mind to take him? and if I should, you know, I should
have plenty of time to bring him into the proper subjection."

"How do you know but he may be married?" asked Bell, who had a little
more forethought than Miss Joe in certain directions.

"Humph!" said Joe, "that _would_ be awkward, especially as I am not
quite ready, yet, for an elopement and the subsequent flattering
paragraphs in the papers, about 'the beautiful and accomplished Miss
J.H.' having left for Europe on the last steamer from Boston, in company
with 'the popular journalist but sad Lothario, Mr. T.L., who has left an
interesting wife and two children to deplore the departure of the
husband and father from the paths of rectitude.'"

"Well, you _are_ incorrigible!" laughed Miss Crawford, fairly carried
away by the irresistible current of the wild girl's humor. "How can you
talk so flippantly of things so deplorable?"

"I scarcely know, myself!" was the answer. "But there is really a dash
of romance about such things, which almost makes them endurable. Poor
Mrs. Brannan made a mess of it, to be sure, coming out at last with a
ruined character and the widow of a man several ranks lower in the army
than the husband from whom she had run away; but was there not something
chivalrous in Wyman coming back at once at the breaking out of the war,
and sending an offer to the man he had injured, to afford him any
satisfaction he might think proper to demand?"

"And was there not something sublimely cutting," asked Bell, "in the
reply of General Brannan that he de