breast. "Listen to me. She has told me that we belong to different worlds—she and I—and to different races, kinds of being, and that there can be no fellowship betwixt us. Where I am she will not be. Between me and you there is a great gulf fixed—see you? and I am as Dives tormented in my flame, and she stands yonder, serene, in cold and complacent blessedness, and will not cross to me with her finger dipped in cold water to cool my tongue; and as for my coming near to her" he laughed fiercely—"that can never be."
"Did she say all that?" asked Miss Trevisa.
"She looked it; she implied it, if she did not say it in these naked words. And, what is more," shouted he, coming before Aunt Dionysia, threateningly, so that she recoiled, "it is true. When she sat there in yonder chair, and I stood here by this hearthstone, and she spoke, I knew it was true; I saw it all—the great gulf unspanned by any bridge. I knew that none could ever bridge it, and there we were, apart for ever, I in my fire burning-, she in Blessedness—indifferent."
"I am very sorry," said Miss Trevisa, "that Judith should so have misconducted herself. My brother brought her up in a manner to my mind, most improper for a young girl. He made her read Rollin's 'Ancient History,' and Blair's 'Chronological Tables,' and really upon my word, I cannot say what else."
"I do not care how it was," said Coppinger. "But here stands the gulf."
"Rollin is in sixteen octavo volumes," said Aunt Dionysia; "and they are thick also."
Coppinger strode about the room, with his hands in his deep coat pockets, his head down.
"My dear brother," continued Miss Trevisa, apologetically, "made of Judith his daily companion, told her all he thought, asked her opinion, as though she were a full-grown woman, and one whose opinion was worth having, whereas he never consulted me, never cared to talk to me about anything, and the consequence is the child has grown up without that respect for her elders and betters, and that deference for the male sex which the male sex expects. I am sure when I was a girl, and of her age, I was very different, very different indeed."
"Of that I have not the smallest doubt," sneered Coppinger. "But never mind about yourself. It is of her
