"It is a love to envy her." Phebe was still looking up at him from her low stool, her face raised as if in appeal.
She always looked very young for her years, and now she seemed not more than a child of sixteen in the waning light.

He could not help it this time; he laid his hand very lightly for one briefest instant on her pretty hair.

"But you will not be less friends with me because I like _you_ best ?" "I will not ever be less friends with you," Phebe replied, soberly.

"I don't change so." "No," he said; "I know you do not.

Nor do I." And then he moved away from her, and began telling an irresistibly comic story about a call he had made on a poor woman that afternoon (he could not for the life of him help seeing the ludicrous side of every thing), and from one subject they passed to another, and when Soeur Angelique summoned them to tea, she found her reverend brother standing in the middle of the room in the full swing of a chorus from "The Pirates," with Phebe whistling the liveliest possible accompaniment, and both of them gesticulating wildly.