He made the gesture that Mrs. Frost called debonnaire--read on for five minutes in silence, insisted on teaching his aunt the cause of the colours in peacock ores, compared them to a pigeon's neck, and talked of old Betty Gervas's tame pigeons; whence he proceeded to memories of the days that he and Mary had spent together, and asked which of their old haunts she had revisited. Had she been into the nursery? 'Oh yes! but I wondered you had sent the old walnut press into that lumber-room.' 'Is that satire?' said Louis, starting and looking in her face. 'I don't know what you mean.' 'I have a better right to ask what you mean by stigmatizing my apartment as a lumber-room?' 'It was only what I saw from the door,' said Mary, a little confused, but rallying and answering with spirit; 'and I must maintain that, if you mean the room over the garden entrance, it is very like a lumber-room.' 'Ah, Mary! you have not outgrown the delusions of your sex. Is an Englishman's house his castle while housemaids maraud over it, ransacking his possessions, irritating poor peaceful dust that only wants to be let alone, sweeping away cherished cobwebs?' 'Oh, if you cherish cobwebs!' said Mary. 'Did not the fortunes of Scotland hang on a spider's thread? Did not a cobweb save the life of Mahomet, or Ali, or a mediaeval saint--no matter which? Was not a spider the solace of the Bastille? Have not I lain for hours on a summer morning watching the tremulous lines of the beautiful geometrical composition?' 'More shame for you!' said Mary, with a sort of dry humorous bluntness. 'The very answer you would have made in old times,' cried Louis, delighted. 'O Mary, you bring me back the days of my youth! You never would see the giant who used to live in that press!' 'I remember our great fall from the top of it.' 'Oh yes!' cried Louis; 'Jem Frost had set us up there bolt upright for sentries, and I saw the enemies too soon, when you would not allow that they were there. I was going to fire my musket at them; but you used violence to keep me steady to my duty--pulled my hair, did not you?' 'I know you scratched me, and we both rolled off together! I wonder we were not both killed!' 'That did not trouble Jem! He picked us up, and ordered us into arrest under the bed for breach of discipline.' 'I fear Jem was a martinet,' said Mrs. Frost. 'That he was! A general formed on the model of him who, not contented with assaulting a demi-lune, had taken une lune toute entiere. We had a siege of the Fort Bombadero, inaccessible, and with mortars firing double-hand grenades. They were dandelion clocks, and there were nettles to act the part of poisoned spikes on the breach.' 'I remember the nettles,' said Mary, 'and Jem's driving you to gather them; you standing with your bare legs in the nettle-bed, when he would make me dig, and I could not come to help you!'