a temple into which it was sacrilege to intrude.  But a more practical question took his attention soon.  The family had come in below, except Jonas and Cynthy Ann—­who had walked slowly, planning a meeting for August—­and Mr. Samuel Anderson, who stood at the front-gate with a neighbor.  August could hear his shrill voice discussing the seventh trumpet and the thousand three hundred and thirty and five days.  It would not do to be discovered where he was.  Beside the fright he would give to Julia, he shuddered at the thought of compromising her in such a way.  To go back was to insure his exposure, for Samuel Anderson had not yet half-settled the question of the trumpets.  Indeed it seemed to August that the world might come to an end before that conversation would.  He heard Humphreys enter his room.  He was now persuaded that the room formerly occupied by Julia must be Jonas’s, and he determined to get to it if he could.  He felt like a villain already.  He would have cheerfully gone to State’s-prison in preference to compromising Julia.  At any rate, he started out of Julia’s room toward the one that was occupied by Jonas.  It was the only road open, and but for an unexpected encounter he would have reached his hiding-place in safety, for the door was but fifteen feet away.

In order to explain the events that follow, I must ask the reader to go back to Julia, and to events that had occurred two hours before.  Hitherto she had walked to and from meeting and “singing” with Humphreys, as a matter of courtesy.  On the evening in question she had absolutely refused to walk with him.  Her mother found that threats were as vain as coaxing.  Even her threat of dying with heart-disease, then and there, killed by her daughter’s disobedience, could not move Julia, who would not even speak with the “spider.”  Her mother took her into the sitting-room alone, and talked with her.

“So this is the way you trifle with gentlemen, is it?  Night before last you engaged yourself to Mr. Humphreys, now you won’t speak to him.  To think that my daughter should prove a heartless flirt!”

I am afraid that the unfilial thought came into Julia’s mind that nothing could have been more in the usual order of things than that the daughter of a coquette should be a flirt.

“You’ll kill me on the spot; you certainly will.”  Julia felt anxious, for her mother showed signs of going into hysterics.  But she put her foot out and shook her head in a way that said that all her friends might die and all the world might go to pieces before she would yield.  Mrs. Anderson had one forlorn hope.  She determined to order that forward.  Leaving Julia alone, she went to her husband.

“Samuel, if you value my life go and speak to your daughter.  She’s got your own stubbornness of will in her.  She is just like you; she will have her own way.  I shall die.”  And Mrs. Abigail Anderson sank into a chair with unmistakable symptoms of a hysterical attack.