"No. I won't join their low frolic; an' you ought to be above it.
I'll pull my curtains an' sit up-stairs all day, an' you shall read to
me."

The other pulled a wry face. This was not her idea of enjoyment.
She went back to the goose sad at heart, for Miss Ruby had a knack of
enforcing her wishes.

Sure enough, soon after dinner was cleared away (a meal through which
Ruby had sulked and Farmer Tresidder eaten heartily, talking with a full
mouth about the rescue, and coarsely ignoring what he called his
daughter's "faddles"), the two girls retired to the chamber up-stairs;
where the mistress was as good as her word, and pulled the dimity
curtains before settling herself down in an easy-chair to listen to
extracts from a polite novel as rendered aloud, under dire compulsion,
by Mary Jane.

The rain had ceased by this, and the wind abated, though it still howled
around the angle of the house and whipped a spray of the monthly-rose
bush on the quarrels of the window, filling the pauses during which
Mary Jane wrestled with a hard word. Ruby herself had taught the girl
this accomplishment--rare enough at the time--and Mary Jane handled it
gingerly, beginning each sentence in a whisper, as if awed by her own
intrepidity, and ending each in a kind of gratulatory cheer. The work
was of that class of epistolary fiction then in vogue, and the extract
singularly well fitted to Ruby's mood.

"My dearest Wil-hel-mina," began Mary Jane, "racked with a hun-dred
conflicting em-otions, I resume the nar-rative of those fa-tal moments
which rapt me from your affec-tion-ate em-brace. Suffer me to re--to