As she introduced this subject, Ambrose suddenly looked out of the window.  She caught sight of his uneasy profile.

“Now, don’t tell me that there’s any bad hews about it!” she cried.  “It is the only pet I have.”

“Miss Harriet,” he said, turning his face farther away, “you forget how long your calf has been out here; it isn’t a calf any longer:  it has had a calf.”

He spoke so sternly that Harriet, who all her life had winced before sternness, felt herself in some wise to be blamed.  And coolness was settling down upon them when she desired only a melting and radiant warmth.

“Well,” she objected apologetically, “isn’t it customary?  What’s the trouble?  What’s the objection?  This is a free country!  Whatever is natural is right!  Why are you so displeased?”

About the same hour the next Monday morning Ambrose was again pacing his hallway and thinking of Harriet.  At least she was no tyrant:  the image of her softness rose before him again.  “I make no mistake this time.”

His uncertainty at the present moment was concerned solely with the problem of what his offering should be in this case:  under what image should love present itself?  The right thought came to him by and by; and taking from his storeroom an ornamental basket with a top to it, he went out to his pigeon house and selected two blue squabs.  They were tender and soft and round; without harshness, cruelty, or deception.  Whatever they seemed to be, that they were; and all that they were was good.

But as Ambrose walked back to the house, he lifted the top of the basket and could but admit that they did look bare.  Might they not, as a love token, be—­unrefined?  He crossed to a flower bed, and, pulling a few rose-geranium leaves, tucked them here and there about the youngsters.

It was not his intention to present these to Harriet in person:  he had accompanied the cream—­he would follow the birds; they should precede him twenty-four hours and the amative poison would have a chance to work.

During that forenoon his shining buggy drawn by his roan mare, herself symbolic of softness, drew up before the entrance of the Conyers homestead.  Ambrose alighted; he lifted the top of the basket—­all was well.

“These pets are for your Miss Harriet,” he said to the maid who answered his ring.

As the maid took the basket through the hall after having watched him drive away, incredulous as to her senses, she met Mrs. Conyers, who had entered the hall from a rear veranda.

“Who rang?” she asked; “and what is that?”

The maid delivered her instructions.  Mrs. Conyers took the basket and looked in.

“Have them broiled for my supper,” she said with a little click of the teeth, and handing the basket to the maid, passed on into her bedroom.

Harriet had been spending the day away from home.  She returned late.  The maid met her at the front door and a few moments of conversation followed.  She hurried into the supper room; Mrs. Conyers sat alone.