“I do' know why they shouldn't,” returned Sennacherib. “It's nothin' but their Christian humbleness as could mek 'em want it at all. The Lord's made 'em a bit better off than their neighbors, an' they feel it undeserved. It's castin' pearls afore swine to play for half on 'em about here.” Fuller, with both hands posed on the baize-clad head of the 'cello, which the small boy had surrendered to him some moments before, shook his fat ribs at this so heartily that Sennacherib himself re laxed into a surly grin, and then Ferdinand felt him self at liberty to laugh also. “You are rather severe upon your audience, Mr. Eld,” he said. “A tongue like a file, our Sennacherib's got,” said the mild Isaiah. “Touches nothin' but what he rasps clean through it.” Ferdinand raised his hat at this moment and made a forward step, with his delicately gloved right hand extended. “Good-morning, Miss Fuller.” Mr. De Blacquaire prided himself, and not without reason, on his own _aplomb_ and self-possession, but he felt now a curious fluttering sensation to which he had hitherto been an entire stranger. Ruth accepted his proffered hand and responded to his salute, and then shook hands with the two brethren. Ferdinand, with a jealousy at which he shortly found time to be surprised, noticed that her manner in shaking hands with these two stout and spectacled old vulgarians differed in no way from her manner in shaking hands with him. This in itself was a renewal of that calm, inexplicable disdain with which the girl had treated him from the first. If rustic beauty had been fluttered at his magnificent pressure, he could have gone his way and thought no more about it; but when rustic beauty was just as cool and unmoved by his appearance as if their social positions had been reversed, the thing became naturally moving, and had in it a lasting astonishment for leisure moments. And there was no denying that the girl was surprisingly pretty. Prettier than ever this Sunday morning, in a remarkably neat dress of dove color, a demurely coquettish hat, and a bit of cherry-colored ribbon. Rustic beauty was not altogether disdainful of town-grown aids, it would seem, for Ferdinand's eye, trained to be critical in such matters, noted that the girl was finely gloved and booted. Her dress was like a part of her, but that, though the young gentleman could not be supposed to know it, was a charm she owed to her own good taste and her own supple fingers. The young gentleman might have been supposed to know, perhaps, that her greatest charm of all was her unconsciousness of charming, and it was certainly this which touched him more than anything else about her. There was no outer sign of the young Ferdinand's inward disturbance. “I am afraid,” he said, resolute to draw her into talk with himself if he could, though it were only for a moment, “I am afraid that I have made Mr. Eld very angry.” Ruth's brown eyes took a half-smiling charge of Sennacherib's surly figure.