“If it’s particularly agreeable to you to have heart disease, why, I’ll try and maintain you have it,” said St. Clare; “I didn’t know it was.”

“Well, I only hope you won’t be sorry for this, when it’s too late!” said Marie; “but, believe it or not, my distress about Eva, and the exertions I have made with that dear child, have developed what I have long suspected.”

What the exertions were which Marie referred to, it would have been difficult to state.  St. Clare quietly made this commentary to himself, and went on smoking, like a hard-hearted wretch of a man as he was, till a carriage drove up before the verandah, and Eva and Miss Ophelia alighted.

Miss Ophelia marched straight to her own chamber, to put away her bonnet and shawl, as was always her manner, before she spoke a word on any subject; while Eva came, at St:  Clare’s call, and was sitting on his knee, giving him an account of the services they had heard.

They soon heard loud exclamations from Miss Ophelia’s room, which, like the one in which they were sitting, opened on to the verandah and violent reproof addressed to somebody.

“What new witchcraft has Tops been brewing?” asked St. Clare.  “That commotion is of her raising, I’ll be bound!”

And, in a moment after, Miss Ophelia, in high indignation, came dragging the culprit along.

“Come out here, now!” she said.  “I will tell your master!”

“What’s the case now?” asked Augustine.

“The case is, that I cannot be plagued with this child, any longer!  It’s past all bearing; flesh and blood cannot endure it!  Here, I locked her up, and gave her a hymn to study; and what does she do, but spy out where I put my key, and has gone to my bureau, and got a bonnet-trimming, and cut it all to pieces to make dolls’ jackets!  I never saw anything like it, in my life!”

“I told you, Cousin,” said Marie, “that you’d find out that these creatures can’t be brought up without severity.  If I had my way, now,” she said, looking reproachfully at St. Clare, “I’d send that child out, and have her thoroughly whipped; I’d have her whipped till she couldn’t stand!”

“I don’t doubt it,” said St. Clare.  “Tell me of the lovely rule of woman!  I never saw above a dozen women that wouldn’t half kill a horse, or a servant, either, if they had their own way with them!—­let alone a man.”

“There is no use in this shilly-shally way of yours, St. Clare!” said Marie.  “Cousin is a woman of sense, and she sees it now, as plain as I do.”

Miss Ophelia had just the capability of indignation that belongs to the thorough-paced housekeeper, and this had been pretty actively roused by the artifice and wastefulness of the child; in fact, many of my lady readers must own that they should have felt just so in her circumstances; but Marie’s words went beyond her, and she felt less heat.

“I wouldn’t have the child treated so, for the world,” she said; “but, I am sure, Augustine, I don’t know what to do.  I’ve taught and taught; I’ve talked till I’m tired; I’ve whipped her; I’ve punished her in every way I can think of, and she’s just what she was at first.”