lived for a while in a mingled vision of his
boyhood on the old farm and in the land of the Greenaway painting-books.

Suddenly a door opened into the green.

A housemaid advanced to the table, bearing in both red hands a long tray
covered with a napkin. On the napkin lay, heaped in rich confusion, a
great pile of spicy, smoking brown cookies.

"They're just out o' the oven," she began, but Varian could contain
himself no longer. He could not be deceived: he would have known those
cookies in the Desert of Sahara. He crossed the little plot in three
long steps, and faced the astonished maid.

"I beg your pardon," he said firmly, "but it is very necessary that I
should have one of those cookies! I hope you can spare one?"

She giggled convulsively.

"I--I guess you can, sir," she murmured, laying down the tray and
retreating toward the house door.

Varian faced the older woman, and, with hat still in hand, instinctively
bowed lower; for this was no housekeeper--he was sure of that. Even as
she met his eyes a great flood of pink rushed to her smooth forehead,
and she dropped her lids as she bowed slightly. He reflected
irrelevantly that he had never seen Mrs. Dudley blush in his life.

"You are very welcome to all you wish, I am sure," she said graciously.
"I--I didn't know any one liked them but me. I always have them made for
me--I taught her the rule. I always call them"--she laughed nervously,
and it dawned on him that this woman was really shy and "talking against
time," as they said--"I always call them 'Aunt Delia's cookies.' They--"

"Aunt Delia's cookies!" he interrupted. "What Aunt Delia?"

"Aunt Delia Parmentre," she returned, a little surprised, evidently,
at this stranger, who, with a straw sailor-hat in one hand and a warm
molasses cooky in the other, stared so intently at her. "She wasn't
really my aunt, of course--"

"But she was mine!" he burst out, "and these are her cookies, and no
mistake. Who are you?"

Again she flushed, but more lightly.

"I am Miss Redding," she said with a gentle dignity, "Mrs. Wilton's
sister."

He stared at her vaguely.

"Mrs. Wilton--oh! you're her sister? I didn't know--" He stopped
abruptly. As his confusion grew, her own faded away.

"You didn't know she had one?" she asked, almost mischievously.

"I didn't know you were here," he recovered himself. "You've never been
with Mrs. Dud before, have you?"

"No, not here when there was company," she said.