`Will you go to the devil!' he exclaimed ferociously, `and let me be!'

`No,' she persisted, `I won't: I can't tell what to do to make you talk to me; and you are determined not to understand. When I call you stupid, I don't mean anything: I don't mean that I despise you. Come, you shall take notice of me, Hareton! you are my cousin, and you shall own me.

`I shall have naught to do wi' you and your mucky pride, and your damned mocking tricks!' he answered. `I'll go to hell, body and soul, before I look sideways after you again. Side out O' t' gait, now; this minute!'

Catherine frowned, and retreated to the window-seat chewing her lip, and endeavouring, by humming an eccentric tune, to conceal a growing tendency to sob.

`You should be friends with your cousin, Mr Hareton,' I interrupted, `since she repents of her sauciness. It would do you a great deal of good: it would make you another man to have her for a companion.'

`A companion?' he cried; `when she hates me, and does not think me fit to wipe her shoon! Nay! if it made me a king, I'd not be scorned for seeking her goodwill any more.'

`It is not I who hate you, it is you who hate me!' wept Cathy, no longer disguising her trouble. `You hate me as much as Mr Heathcliff does, and more.'

`You're a damned liar,' began Earnshaw: `why have I made him angry, by taking your part, then, a hundred times? and that when you sneered at and despised me, and--Go on plaguing me, and I'll step in yonder, and say you worried me out of the kitchen!'

`I didn't know you took my part,' she answered, drying her eyes; `and I was miserable and bitter at everybody; but now I thank you, and beg you to forgive me: what can I do besides?'

She returned to the hearth, and frankly extended her hand. He blackened and scowled like a thunder cloud, and kept his fists resolutely clenched, and his gaze fixed on the ground. Catherine, by instinct, must have divined it was obdurate perversity, and not dislike, that prompted this dogged conduct; for, after remaining an instant undecided, she stooped and impressed on his cheek a gentle kiss. The little rogue thought I had not seen her, and, drawing back, she took her former station by the window, quite demurely. I shook my head reprovingly, and then she blushed and whispered:

`Well! what should I have done, Ellen? He wouldn't shake hands, and he wouldn't look: I must show him some way that I like him--that I want to be friends.'

Whether the kiss convinced Hareton, I cannot tell: he was very careful, for some minutes, that his face should not be seen, and when he did raise it, he was sadly puzzled where to turn his eyes.

Catherine employed herself in wrapping a handsome book neatly in white paper, and having tied it with a bit of ribband, and addressed it to `Mr Hareton Earnshaw', she desired me to be her ambassadress, and convey the present to its destined recipient.

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