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258 Allan's intense relief. "I think politics are very difficult to understand; don't you?"

"I find them most bewildering," he confessed, and he had to wait patiently a little longer while she read the rest of the news to herself and made many comments on it out aloud and he was quite willing to believe her when she told him presently that there was absolutely nothing in the paper.

"Never mind about the paper, I've had quite enough," he said; "won't you talk instead?" "What a good idea," she said; "I'll tell you all the news, shall I? There's going to be a temperance meeting in the schoolroom to morrow, and I'm going for a walk on Blackcliff Hill this afternoon."

"I always walk on Blackcliff Hill myself in the afternoon," murmured Allan in parenthesis.

"The Squire has got a cold—oh, I told you that," she went on. "And let me see, is there anything else? I know there was a tremendous fuss about something before I got up this morning; somebody took a horse somewhere and broke it somehow or another, its knees or the harness or something, and I came down late to breakfast. That really is all. Did you ever know such a place as this?"

"Oh, but that isn't nearly all," he protested with a smile.

"Why, what else?"

"Well yourself," he said, and put his leg over the arm of his chair and turned his face in her direction.

"Oh, but that's so dull," she said hastily; "and besides, there isn't anything to tell—there isn't really."

"Yet you have lived," he said slowly, "lived, and perhaps suffered a little as well."

"Well, I suppose I have had my share," she said with the necessary sigh.