“Just then some one lifted the latch, and poor Biddy began to scream: ‘O Henry, dear! what shall I do? That’s father come back. He’ll surely kill you or me, or do some rash deed. What can I do? Here, here,’ she said, opening a kind of closet-door, ‘step in, that’s a dear, and wait till I can get you out. Don’t cough or sneeze, but keep quiet and still as a mouse till I come to call you.’ In I went, and Biddy shut the door. Well, do you know, I found she had put me in a sort of storeroom, where they kept the sweets; and on a long table there was such a spread: raspberry-creams, ices, jellies, all kinds of flummery, and in the middle a thing I never could resist--a fine sugary cake. Didn’t I help myself! and when I began to think that all these niceties were got up to fill up the waistcoats of those rollicking fellows that had cut me out of my Biddy’s heart, it did make me half mad. However, when I thought of that cake, I said to myself, ‘Not one crumb of that lovely thing shall go down their horrid throats after all--see if it does!’ We wore long wide pockets in those days, big enough to hold a Christmas-pie. So in went the cake; and there was room besides for a whole plate of macaroons. Presently Biddy was at the door, and in such a way. ‘Make, haste, Henry, dear--quick; and do go straight home! I would not have you meet father for the world!’ You may guess how I scudded away through the streets with my skirts bulging out, and the boys shouting after me, ‘There goes the Oxford scholar with his humps slipped down!’ “Next time I met Biddy, it was coming out of church. She could hardly tell whether to laugh or cry. ‘How could you, Henry, dear?’ she said,--‘how could you carry off our beautiful cake?’ ‘How? Biddy, dear,’ said I; ‘why, in my pocket, to be sure.’ “But the worst of all was that Biddy was cold to me from that very time; and when I came home from college the next year I heard that she was engaged to a Captain Upjohns, and she was married to him not long after. So he had Biddy and I had the cake. But she was my first love; and I do think, after all, notwithstanding the three Mrs. Vivians, she was verily my last love also. People say that Queen Mary declared that if she was opened after her death, Calais would be found graven on her heart.[151] And I, too, say often, that if my dead bosom were examined, it would be found that Biddy Morrice was carved on mine.[152]