'I think I can show you from here where I suspect they have stolen a nest, lazy things!' answered Miss Dorothy, sympathetically, and she slipped her arm round my waist as we looked out of the window together in the suspected direction. 'Then you don't find them tiresome? Some people do, you know.' 'No,' I said, 'I don't,' And then Miss Dorothy confided to me that she was very glad; 'for, you know,' she said, I one can't like people who find cuckoos tiresome,' and we concluded that we really must go down to tea. At that point, however, I was obliged to ask Miss Dorothy to wait until I did a little towards improving my appearance. I had quite forgotten, between the cuckoos and the cowslips, that I had come up principally to wash my face. 'You met our cousin on the ship crossing the Atlantic, didn't you?' the third Miss Stacy remarked, enthusiastically, over the teapot. 'How delightfully romantic to make a--a friend--a friend like that, I mean, on a ship in the middle of the ocean! Didn't you always feel perfectly comfortable afterwards, as if, no matter what happened, he would be sure to save you?' 'Kitty!' said Mrs. Stacy from the sofa, in a tone of helpless rebuke. 'Mother, darling!' said Kitty, 'I do beg your pardon! Your daughter always speaks first and thinks afterwards, doesn't she, sweetest mother! But you must have had that feeling,' Miss Stacy continued to me; 'I know you had!' 'Oh, no!' I returned. It was rather an awkward situation --I had no wish to disparage Miss Stacy's cousin's heroism, which, nevertheless, I had not relied upon in the least. 'I don't think I thought about being drowned,' I said. 'That proves it!' she cried in triumph. 'Your confidence was so perfect that it was unconscious! Sweetest mother--there, I won't say another word; not another syllable, mother mine, shall pass your daughter's lips! But one does like to show one's self in the right, doesn't one, Miss Wick?'--and Mrs. Stacy surrendered to an impulsive volume of embraces which descended from behind the sofa, chiefly upon the back of her neck.