“Then I call that rude.”

“So do I; and then he whistles more and more.”

“Yes; but, aunt, if any serious trouble or grief fell upon you, you would find Mr. Bazalgette a much greater comfort and a better stay than poor spiritless me.”

“Oh, if the house took fire and fell about our ears, he would come out of his shell, no doubt; or if the children all died one after another, poor dear little souls; but those great troubles only come in stories.  Give me a friend that can sympathize with the real hourly mortifications of a too susceptible nature; sit on this ottoman, and let me go on.  Where was I when Jones came and interrupted us?  They always do just at the interesting point.”

Miss Fountain’s face promptly wreathed itself into an expectant smile.  She abandoned her hand and her ear, and leaned her graceful person toward her aunt, while that lady murmured to her in low and thrilling tones—­his eyes, his long hair, his imaginative expressions, his romantic projects of frugal love; how her harsh papa had warned Adonis off the premises; how Adonis went without a word (as pale as death, love), and soon after, in his despair, flung himself—­to an ugly heiress; and how this disappointment had darkened her whole life, and so on.

Perhaps, if Adonis had stood before her now, rolling his eyes, and his phrases hot from the annuals, the flourishing matron might have sent him to the servants’ hall with a wave of her white and jeweled hand.  But the melody disarms this sort of brutal criticism—­a woman’s voice relating love’s young dream; and then the picture—­a matron still handsome pouring into a lovely virgin’s ear the last thing she ought; the young beauty’s eyes mimicking sympathy; the ripe beauty’s soft, delicious accents—­purr! purr! purr!

Crash overhead! a window smashed aie! aie! clatter! clatter! screams of infantine rage and feminine remonstrance, feet pattering, and a general hullabaloo, cut the soft recital in two.  The ladies clasped hands, like guilty things surprised.

Lucy sprang to her feet; the oppressed one sank slowly and gracefully back, inch by inch, on the ottoman, with a sigh of ostentatious resignation, and gazed, martyr-like, on the chandelier.

“Will you not go up to the nursery?” cried Lucy, in a flutter.

“No, dear,” replied the other, faintly, but as cool as a marble slab; “you go; cast some of your oil upon those ever-troubled waters and then come back and let us try once more.”

Miss Fountain heard but half this sentence; she was already gliding up the stairs.  She opened the nursery door, and there stood in the middle of the room “Original Sin.”  Its name after the flesh was Master Reginald.  It was half-past six, had been baptized in church, after which every child becomes, according to polemic divines of the day, “a little soul of Christian fire” until it goes to a public school.  And there it straddled, two scarlet cheeks puffed out with rage, soft flaxen hair streaming, cerulean eyes glowing, the poker grasped in two chubby fists.  It had poked a window in vague ire, and now threatened two females with extinction if they riled it any more.