answer just as well."

"Not quite," she said softly, with a smile designed to be bewitching.

As I passed up the hall I heard her say, "Silas Jones, I'm pleased to
see thee."

I threw myself on the lounge in my room in angry disgust.

"O Nature!" I exclaimed, "what excuse have you for such perverseness?
By every law of probability--by the ordinary sequence of cause and
effect--this girl should have been what I fancied her to be. This,
then, forsooth, is the day of my fate! It would be the day of doom did
some malicious power chain me to this brainless, soulless, heartless
creature. What possessed Nature to make such a blunder, to begin so
fairly and yet reach such a lame and impotent conclusion? To the eye
the girl is the fair and proper outcome of this home and beautiful
country life. In reality she is a flat contradiction to it all,
reversing in her own character the native traits and acquired graces
of her father and mother.

"As if controlled and carried forward by a hidden and malign power,
she goes steadily against her surrounding influences that, like the
winds of heaven, might have wafted her toward all that is good and
true. Is not sweet, quaint Mrs. Yocomb her mother? Is not the genial,
hearty old gentleman her father? Has she not developed among scenes
that should ennoble her nature, and enrich her mind with ideality?
There is Oriental simplicity and largeness in her parents' faith.
Abraham sitting at the door of his tent, could scarcely have done
better. Hers is the simplicity of silliness, which reveals what a