“I’m very ill already,” said Stella, with a cough. “I am being thrust into my grave. Let them bring us together--poor, poor Algy and me. Oh, if we are both to be victims, let it be so! We will take each other’s hands and go down--go down together to the----” “Oh, Katie, can’t you stop her?” cried the father. Stella was sobbing with delicious despair over the thought of the two delightful, dreadful funerals, and all the world weeping over her untimely fate. Stella recovered rapidly when her father was put to the door. She said with a pretty childish reverberation of her sob: “For you know, Kate, it never was he--that would be the poignant thing, wouldn’t it?--it was not he that I ever would have chosen. But to be united in--in a common fate, with two graves together, don’t you know, and an inscription, and people saying, ‘Both so young!’” She paused to dry her eyes, and then she laughed. “There is nothing in him, don’t you know; it was Charlie that did all the work. He was nearly as frightened as I was. Oh, I don’t think anything much of Algy, but I shall go to see him all the same--if it were only to shock papa.” “You had better get well yourself in the meantime,” said Katherine. “Oh, you cold, cold--toad! What do you care? It would have been better for you if I had been drowned, Kate. Then you would have been the only daughter and the first in the house, but now, you know, it’s Stella again--always Stella. Papa is an unjust old man and makes favourites; but you need not think, however bad I am, and however good you are, that you will ever cure him of that.” CHAPTER VI.