keepin' you an' Charlotte in the house a year!"

"It's his way, an' I ain't goin' to have anything said against it,"
Sarah Barnard would retort stanchly, and her sister would sniff back
again. Charlotte was as loyal as her mother; she did not like it if
even her lover intimated anything in disfavor of her father.

No matter how miserable she was in consequence of her acquiescence
with her father's will, she sternly persisted.

To-night she knew that Barnabas was waiting impatiently for her
signal to leave the rest of the company and go with her into the
front room; there was also a tender involuntary impatience and
longing in every nerve of her body, but nobody would have suspected
it; she sat there as calmly as if Barnabas were old Squire Payne, who
sometimes came in of a Sabbath evening, and seemed to be listening
intently to her mother and her Aunt Sylvia talking about the spring
cleaning.

Cephas and Barnabas were grimly silent. The young man suspected that
Cephas had prohibited the front room; he was indignant about that,
and the way in which Charlotte had been summoned in from the entry,
and he had no diplomacy.

Charlotte, under her calm exterior, grew uneasy; she glanced at her
mother, who glanced back. It was to both women as if they felt by
some subtle sense the brewing of a tempest. Charlotte unobtrusively
moved her chair a little nearer her lover's; her purple delaine skirt
swept his knee; both of them blushed and trembled with Cephas's black
eyes upon them.