rubbed her dimpled chin with a very pretty finger.

"Isn't that the kind of question they used to ask oracles?" she asked
lazily--"Oh! no, it was the oracles themselves that were so vague. Well,
I suppose because 'was' is as different from 'is' as 'as' is from 'shall
be.' We are changed, Cousin; that's all."

He pointed to his patent receiver, and grew angry.

"Oh, it isn't the receiver," she said, smoothing her curling hair; "it's
us. You don't understand me a bit--not now--and that's why you can't
hear me. Take my advice, Morris"--and she looked at him sharply--"when
you find a woman whom you can hear on your patent receiver, you had
better marry her. It will be a good excuse for keeping her at a distance
afterwards."

Then he lost his temper; indeed, he raved, and stormed, and nearly
smashed the patent receiver in his fury. To a scientific man, let it
be admitted, it was nothing short of maddening to be told that the
successful working of his instrument, to the manufacture of which he
had given eight years of toil and study, depended upon some pre-existent
sympathy between the operators of its divided halves. If that were so,
what was the use of his wonderful discovery, for who could ensure a
sympathetic correspondent? And yet the fact remained that when, in
their playmate days, he understood his cousin Mary, and when her quiet,
indolent nature had been deeply moved by the shock of the news of her
mother's peril, the aerophone had worked. Whereas now, when she had
become a grown-up young lady, he did not understand her any longer--he,
whose heart was wrapped up in his experiments, and who by nature feared
the adult members of her sex, and shrank from them; when, too, her