s?"

"No; I only felt it was unusual; something I could not understand; and
I did not like it. Therefore I said 'Don't.'"

"But you admit it was sweet?" persisted the Boy.

"Exactly," replied the Aunt; "quite incomprehensibly sweet. And I do
not like things I cannot comprehend; especially with amazing boys
about!"

"Didn't you know it was love?" asked the Boy, softly.

"No," replied the Aunt, emphatically; "most certainly, I did not."

The Boy got up, and came and knelt beside the arm of her chair.

"It was love," he said, his lips very close to the soft waves of her
hair.

"Go back to your seat at once," said the Aunt, sternly.

The Boy went.

"And where does poor Mollie come in, in all this?" inquired the Aunt,
with some asperity.

"Mollie?" said the Boy, complacently. "Oh, Mollie understood all
right. She loves Phil, you know; intends to stick to him, and knows
you will back her. The last part of the time, I brought her notes from
Phil, every day. Don't be angry, dear. You would have done it
yourself, if Mollie and Phil had got hold of you, and implored you to
be a go-between. You remember the day we invaded the kitchen to see
how Martha made those little puffy buns--you know--the explosives? You
pinch them in the middle, and they burst into hundreds and thousands of
little pieces. Jolly things for a stiff
stand-up-in-a-crowd-and-all-hold-your-own-cups kind of drawing-room
party; what we used to call 'a Perpendicular' in my Cambridge days. I
suppose they still keep up the name. Fancy those little buns exploding
all over the place; and when you try to pick up the fragments, they go
into simply millions of crumbs, between your agitated fingers and
anxious thumb!"

The Boy slapped his knee in intense enjoyment, and momentarily lost the
thread of the conversation. The Aunt's mind was not sufficiently
detached to feel equal to a digression into peals of laughter over this
vision of the explosive buns. She wanted to find out how much Mollie
knew. When the Boy had finished rocking backwards and forwards in his
chair, she suggested, tentatively: "You went to the kitchen--?"

"Oh, yes," said the Boy, recovering. "We went to the kitchen to watch
Martha make them, and to get the recipe. You see Mollie wanted them
for her father's clerical 'at homes.' Oh, I say--fancy! The
archdeacons and curates, the rectors and vicars, all standing in a
solemn crowd on the Bishop's best velvet-pile carpet; t