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.

Charlotte never knew quite how it began, but her father suddenly flung out a dangerous topic like a long-argued bone of contention, and he and Barnabas were upon it.  Barnabas was a Democrat, and Cephas was a Whig, and neither ever forgot it of the other.  None of the women fairly understood the point at issue; it was as if they drew back their feminine skirts and listened amazed and trembling to this male hubbub over something outside their province.  Charlotte grew paler and paler.  She looked piteously at her mother.

“Now, father, don’t,” Sarah ventured once or twice, but it was like a sparrow piping against the north wind.

Charlotte laid her hand on her lover’s arm and kept it there, but he did not seem to heed her.  “Don’t,” she said; “don’t, Barnabas.  I think there’s going to be a frost to-night; don’t you?” But nobody heard her.  Sylvia Crane, in the background, clutched the arms of her rocking-chair with her thin hands.

Suddenly both men began hurling insulting epithets at each other.  Cephas sprang up, waving his right arm fiercely, and Barnabas shook off Charlotte’s hand and was on his feet.

“Get out of here!” shouted Cephas, in a hoarse voice—­“get out of here!  Get out of this house, an’ don’t you ever darse darken these doors again while the Lord Almighty reigns!” The old man was almost inarticulate; he waved his arms, wagged his head, and stamped; he looked like a white blur with rage.

“I never will, by the Lord Almighty!” returned Barnabas, in an awful voice; then the door slammed after him.  Charlotte sprang up.

“Set down!” shouted Cephas.  Charlotte rushed forward.  “You set down!” her father repeated; her mother caught hold of her dress.

“Charlotte, do set down,” she whispered, glancing at her husband in terror.  But Charlotte pulled her dress away.