After puzzling himself over this human problem for half an hour he gave it up, and straightway began to work at another. He asked himself how it could be possible that Cousin Sudie should be attracted by Dr. Charley Harrison. Possibly the reader has had occasion to work at a similar problem in his time, and if so I need not tell him how incapable it proved of solution. Of the fact Robert was now convinced, and the fact annoyed him. It annoyed him too that he could not account for the fact; and then it annoyed him still more to know that he could be annoyed at all in the case, for he was perfectly sure--or nearly so--that he was not himself in love with his little friend at Shirley. And yet he felt a strange yearning to battle in some way with young Harrison, and to conquer him. He wanted to beat the man at something, it mattered little what, and to triumph over him. But he did not allow himself even mentally to formulate this feeling. If he had he would have discovered its injustice, and cast it from him as unworthy. His instinct warned him of this, and so he refused to put his wish into form lest he should thereby lose the opportunity of entertaining it. With thoughts like these the young man rode homewards, and naturally enough he was not in the best of humors when he sat down in the parlor at Shirley. The conversation, in some inscrutable way, turned upon Cousin Sarah Ann, and Robert so far forgot himself as to express pleasure in the thought that that lady was in no way akin to himself. "But she is kin to you, Robert," said Aunt Catherine. "How can that be, Aunt Catherine?" asked the young gentleman. "Show him with the keys, Aunt Catherine, show him with the keys," said Billy, who had returned from court that day. "Come, Sudie, where's your basket? I want to see if Aunt Catherine can't muddle Bob's head as badly as she does mine sometimes. Here are the keys. Explain it to him, Aunt Catherine, and if he knows when you get through whether he is his great grandfather's nephew or his uncle's son once removed, I'll buy his skull for tissue paper at once. A skull that can let key-basket genealogy through it a'n't thick enough to grow hair on." The task was one that the old lady loved, and so without paying the slightest attention to Billy's bantering she began at once to arrange the keys from Sudie's basket upon the floor in the shape of a complicated genealogical table. "Now my child," said she, pointing to the great key at top, "the smoke-house key is your great great grandmother, who was a Pembroke. The Pembrokes were always considered----" "Always considered smoke-house keys--remember, Bob."