Returning from the drive on the morning of Mrs. McLean’s last recorded remark, Mr. Raleigh, who had remained to give the horses in charge to a servant, was about to pass, when the tableau within the drawing-room caught his attention and altered his course.  He entered, and flung his gloves down on a table, and threw himself on the floor beside Marguerite and the children.  She appeared to be revisited by a ray of her old sunshine, and had unrolled a giant parcel of candied sweets, which their mother would have sacrificed on the shrine of jalap and senna, the purchase of a surreptitious moment, and was now dispensing the brilliant comestibles with much ill-subdued glee.  One mouth, that had bitten off the head of a checkerberry chanticleer, was convulsed with the acidulous tickling of sweetened laughter, till the biter was bit and a metamorphosis into the animal of attack seemed imminent; at the hands of another a warrior in barley-sugar was experiencing the vernacular for defeat with reproving haste and gravity; and there was yet another little omnivorous creature that put out both hands for indiscriminate snatching, and made a spectacle of himself in a general plaster of gum-arabic-drop and brandy-smash.

“Contraband?” said Mr. Raleigh.

“And sweet as stolen fruit,” said Marguerite.  “Ursule makes the richest comfits, but not so innumerable as these.  Mamma and I owe our sweet-tooth and honey-lip to bits of her concoction.”

“Mrs. Purcell,” asked Mr. Raleigh, as that lady entered, “is this little banquet no seduction to you?”

“What are you doing?” she replied.

“Drinking honey-dew from acorns.”

“Laudersdale as ever!” ejaculated she, looking over his shoulder.  “I thought you had ‘no sympathy with’”——­

“But I ‘like to see other folks take’”——­

“Their sweets, in this case.  No, thank you,” she continued, after this little rehearsal of the past.  “What are you poisoning all this brood for?”

“Mrs. Laudersdale eats sweetmeats; they don’t poison her,” remonstrated Katy.

“Mrs. Laudersdale, my dear, is exceptional.”

Katy opened her eyes, as if she had been told that the object of her adoration was Japanese.

“It is the last grain that completes the transformation, as your story-books have told; and one day you will see her stand, a statue of sugar, and melt away in the sun.  To be sure, the whole air will be sweetened, but there will be no Mrs. Laudersdale.”

“For shame, Mrs. Purcell!” cried Marguerite.  “You’re not sweet-tempered, or you’d like sweet dainties yourself.  Here are nuts swathed in syrup; you’ll have none of them?  Here are health and slumber and idle dreams in a chocolate-drop.  Not a chocolate?  Here are dates; if you wouldn’t choose the things in themselves, truly you would for their associations?  See, when you take up one, what a picture follows it:  the plum that has swung at the top of a palm and crowded into itself