"Now, brother, you needn't tell me; there is some mystery about the interest you take in that child, you know there is."
"I am fond of children," said Mr. Sewell, dryly.
"Well, but you don't take as much interest in other boys. I never heard of your teaching any of them Latin before."
"Well, Emily, he is an uncommonly interesting child, and the providential circumstances under which he came into our neighborhood"—
"Providential fiddlesticks!" said Miss Emily, with heightened color, "I believe you knew that boy's mother."
This sudden thrust brought a vivid color into Mr. Sewell's cheeks. To be interrupted so unceremoniously, in the midst of so very proper and ministerial a remark, was rather provoking, and he answered, with some asperity,—
"And suppose I had, Emily, and supposing there were any painful subject connected with this past event, you might have sufficient forbearance not to try to make me speak on what I do not wish to talk of."
Mr. Sewell was one of your gentle, dignified men, from whom Heaven deliver an inquisitive female friend! If such people would only get angry, and blow some unbecoming blast, one might make something of them; but speaking, as they always do, from the serene heights of immaculate propriety, one gets in the wrong before one knows it, and has nothing for it but to beg pardon. Miss Emily had, however, a feminine resource: she began to cry—wisely confining herself to the simple eloquence of tears and sobs. Mr. Sewell sat as awkwardly as if he had trodden on a kitten's toe, or brushed down a china cup, feeling as if he were a great, horrid, clumsy boor, and his poor little sister a martyr.
"Come, Emily," he said, in a softer tone, when the sobs subsided a little.
But Emily didn't "come," but went at it with a fresh burst. Mr. Sewell had a vision like that which drowning men are said to have, in which all Miss Emily's sisterly devotions, stocking-darnings, account-keepings, nursings and tendings, and infinite self-sacrifices, rose up before him: and there she was—crying!