“It is a lovely drive,” she said, “and it will do you far more good than sitting on the pier. I am so glad to have you with me, dear children.” She seemed to delight in calling them children, and it was odd, but each time that she said the word it seemed to give her a stronger hold on them. She turned to Florence. “Are your father and mother quite well, my dear?” she asked, and waited with polite eagerness for a reply. Walter put his hand on his wife’s. “She only has a mother,” he said gently. Aunt Anne looked quite penitent. She winked with her left eye and was silent for a moment or two, almost as if she meditated shedding a tear for the defunct father of the niece by marriage whom she had never seen in her life before to-day. Suddenly she turned the subject so grotesquely that they nearly laughed. “Are you fond of chocolates, my darling?” “Yes——” Florence hesitated a minute and then said softly, “Yes, Aunt Anne, very”—she had not had occasion to give the old lady any name in the few words she had spoken previously. “Dear child, I knew you would be,” Aunt Anne said, and from under her shawl she produced a box covered with white satin paper and having on its lid a very bright picture of a very smart lady. “I bought that box of chocolates for you as I came along. I thought Florence would be like the picture on the lid,” she added, turning to her nephew; “and she is, don’t you think so, Walter dear?” “Yes, Aunt Anne, she is—it is a most beautiful lady,” he answered, and he looked fondly at his wife and drew up his lips a little bit in a manner that Florence knew meant, in the language only she and he in all the wide world understood, that in his thoughts he kissed her. Aunt Anne was a dear old lady, Florence thought, and of course she liked, and always would like, any relation of Walter’s; still, she did so wish that on this particular day, their last by the sea together, Aunt Anne had kept her distance. Walter was so pale when they left town, but since Friday, with nothing to do but to get brown in the sun, he had been looking better and handsomer every day, and this last one they had longed to enjoy in their own lazy way; and now all their little plans were spoilt. To-morrow he would be at his office: it was really too bad, though it was ungrateful to think it, perhaps, with the remembrance of Aunt Anne’s embrace fresh upon her, and the box of chocolates on her lap. Still, after all, she felt justified, for she knew that Walter was raging inwardly, and that if they were alone he would use some short but very effective words to describe his own feeling in respect to the turning up of Aunt Anne. Only he was so good, so gentle and considerate, that, no matter what his thoughts might be, of course he would not let Aunt Anne feel how much her kindness bothered him.