“I really forget,” replied Richard, considering.  “But there must have been.  The old gentleman had time enough to have several.  I believe, however, that history is rather silent about his domestic affairs.”

“Well, then,” said Margaret, after thinking it over, “I would like to be as old as the youngest Mrs. Methuselah.”

“That was probably the last one,” remarked Richard, with great profundity.  “She was probably some giddy young thing of seventy or eighty.  Those old widowers never take a wife of their own age.  I shouldn’t want you to be seventy, Margaret,—­or even eighty.”

“On the whole, perhaps, I shouldn’t fancy it myself.  Do you approve of persons marrying twice?”

“N—­o, not at the same time.”

“Of course I didn’t mean that,” said Margaret, with asperity.  “How provoking you can be!”

“But they used to,—­in the olden time, don’t you know?”

“No, I don’t.”

Richard burst out laughing.  “Imagine him,” he cried,—­“imagine Methuselah in his eight or nine hundredth year, dressed in his customary bridal suit, with a sprig of century-plant stuck in his button-hole!”

“Richard,” said Margaret solemnly, “you shouldn’t speak jestingly of a scriptural character.”

At this Richard broke out again.  “But gracious me!” he exclaimed, suddenly checking himself.  “I am forgetting you all this while!”

Richard hurriedly reversed the mass of plaster on the table, and released Margaret’s half-petrified fingers.  They were shriveled and colorless with the cold.

“There isn’t any feeling in it whatever,” said Margaret, holding up her hand helplessly, like a wounded wing.

Richard took the fingers between his palms, and chafed them smartly for a moment or two to restore the suspended circulation.

“There, that will do,” said Margaret, withdrawing her hand.

“Are you all right now?”

“Yes, thanks;” and then she added, smiling, “I suppose a scientific fellow could explain why my fingers seem to be full of hot pins and needles shooting in every direction.”

“Tyndall’s your man—­Tyndall on Heat,” answered Richard, with a laugh, turning to examine the result of his work.  “The mold is perfect, Margaret.  You were a good girl to keep so still.”

Richard then proceeded to make the cast, which was soon placed on the window ledgde to harden in the sun.  When the plaster was set, he cautiously chipped off the shell with a chisel, Margaret leaning over his shoulder to watch the operation,—­and there was the little white claw, which ever after took such dainty care of his papers, and ultimately became so precious to him as a part of Margaret’s very self that he would not have exchanged it for the Venus of Milo.

But as yet Richard was far enough from all that.

X