“Your mamma’s trouble is great, Barbara; and she is not strong.”

“I think all our troubles have been great since—­since that dark evening,” responded Barbara.

“Have you heard from Anne?” inquired Mr. Carlyle, willing to change the subject.

“Yes, she is very well.  What do you think they are going to name the baby?  Anne; after her mamma.  So very ugly a name!  Anne!”

“I do not think so,” said Mr. Carlyle.  “It is simple and unpretending, I like it much.  Look at the long, pretentious names of our family—­Archibald!  Cornelia!  And yours, too—­Barbara!  What a mouthful they all are!”

Barbara contracted her eyebrows.  It was equivalent to saying that he did not like her name.

They reached the gate, and Mr. Carlyle was about to pass out of it when Barbara laid her hand on his arm to detain him, and spoke in a timid voice,—­

“Archibald!”

“What is it?”

“I have not said a word of thanks to you for this,” she said, touching the chain and locket; “my tongue seemed tied.  Do not deem me ungrateful.”

“You foolish girl!  It is not worth them.  There!  Now I am paid.  Good-night, Barbara.”

He had bent down and kissed her cheek, swung through the gate, laughing, and strode away.  “Don’t say I never gave you anything,” he turned his head round to say, “Good-night.”

All her veins were tingling, all her pulses beating; her heart was throbbing with its sense of bliss.  He had never kissed her, that she could remember, since she was a child.  And when she returned indoors, her spirits were so extravagantly high that Mrs. Hare wondered.

“Ring for the lamp, Barbara, and you can get to your work.  But don’t have the shutters closed; I like to look out on these light nights.”

Barbara, however, did not get to her work; she also, perhaps, liked “looking out on a light night,” for she sat down at the window.  She was living the last half hour over again. “’Don’t say I never gave you anything,’” she murmured; “did he allude to the chain or to the—­kiss?  Oh, Archibald, why don’t you say that you love me?”

Mr. Carlyle had been all his life upon intimate terms with the Hare family.  His father’s first wife—­for the late lawyer Carlyle had been twice married—­had been a cousin of Justice Hare’s, and this had caused them to be much together.  Archibald, the child of the second Mrs. Carlyle, had alternately teased and petted Anne and Barbara Hare, boy fashion.  Sometimes he quarreled with the pretty little girls, sometimes he caressed them, as he would have done had they been his sisters; and he made no scruple of declaring publicly to the pair that Anne was his favorite.  A gentle, yielding girl she was, like her mother; whereas Barbara displayed her own will, and it sometimes clashed with young Carlyle’s.