“Queenie, then, it is—for by Jove, I do love you; and you must call me Phil, if you love me, and so we seal the compact,” the young man said, touching again the sweet, girlish lips, which this time kissed him back without the least hesitancy or token of consciousness. And so they made it up, these cousins who had quarreled on the occasion of their first interview; and Phil picked up the bits of broken china and the napkin, and wiped up the water with his handkerchief, and told her he could cure her headache by rubbing, just as he often cured his mother’s. And Queenie, as he ever after called her, grew as soft and gentle as a kitten, and, leaning her head upon the back of her chair, submitted to the rubbing and manipulations of her forehead until the pain actually ceased, for there was a wonderful mesmeric power in Phil’s hands, and he threw his whole soul into the task, and worked like a professional, talking learnedly of negative and positive conditions, and feeling sorry when his cousin declared the pain gone, and asked him to throw open the blinds and let in the light, and then sit down where she could look at him. There was perfect harmony between them now, and for an hour or more they talked together, and Reinette told Phil everything she could think of with regard to her past life, and asked him numberless questions concerning his own family and the Fergusons generally. “I am ashamed of myself,” she said, “and I am going to reform—going to cultivate the Fergusons, though I don’t believe I can ever do much with Anna. What ails her, Phil, to be so bitter against everybody? Are they so very poor?” “Not at all,” said Phil. “Uncle Tom—that’s her father—is a good, honest, hard-working man, odd as Dick’s hat-band, and something of a codger, who wears leather strings in his shoes, and never says his soul is his own in the presence of his wife and daughter; but he is perfectly respectable, though he doesn’t go to church much on Sundays, and always calls my mother ‘Miss Rossiter,’ though she’s his half-sister.” “What?” and Reinette looked up quickly. “Aren’t we own cousins, and isn’t your mother my own aunt?” “No,” Phil answered reluctantly; then, thinking she would rather hear the truth from him than from any one else, he told her of his grandfather’s two wives, one of whom was his grandmother and one hers. “And so the Martins and the prize-fighters are not one bit yours; they are all mine,” Reinette said, the tears rushing to her eyes again. “Nonsense, Queenie; that doesn’t matter a bit. Remember what I told you; blood does not count in this country. Nobody will think less of you because of those fighters, or fancy you want to knock him down.” “But I feel sometimes as if I could; that must be the Martin in me,” Reinette said, laughingly; and then she spoke again of Anna, who Phil said was too sensitive, and jealous, and ready to suspect a slight where none was intended.