At which remark--the energy of which we have endeavored to portray in the most crumpled italics--the door opened to admit, not Jane, but Aunt Lovey, and our history of Mrs. Bunker's tribulations began. She gave one glance at her visitor, one to herself, and round the room. There was no help for it--she was obliged to deposit baby in the cradle, screaming as he was, and advance to make a "first impression." Aunt Lovey did not look shocked or disgusted--a little surprised certainly, for, knowing her nephew's orderly propensities, this was not what she expected to find his home, and the untidy, tired, fretted-looking woman who introduced herself as his wife, did not certainly answer to the lover's descriptions of his betrothed. However, she had been a housekeeper, and knew what Monday mornings were, with only one maid of all work, and a young child to see to. So she kissed her niece very cordially for the warm welcome she offered, and begging 'not to be minded, as she understood these little troubles,' sat down, laid aside her bonnet and shawl, and asked for the baby. There it was again--hardest of all! Mrs. Bunker's personal vanity, in departing from her as a married woman, had rested and centred itself on the baby. Aunt Lovey had taken the utmost interest in its advent--knitted all its socks, the very blue pair, soiled and dirty, which he was kicking out at that moment--and in return, had been favored by rapturous accounts of his _beauty_ at three days old, his knowingness at three months. Mrs. Bunker had pictured herself presenting the baby in grand toilet to his great-aunt, and seeing her surprise, as the old lady confessed the half had not been told her--"oh, dear!" But there was no help for it, and she was obliged to withdraw the poor little juvenile from its involuntary confinement, ready to cry with weariness and disappointment, as she tried to coax it into something like good-humor. Jane, drawn by curiosity where duty failed, arrived to complete the tableau, slamming the door, and slopping over the pump-water on her way to the wash-kitchen. She must have been experimenting on the principle that "the longest way round is the shortest way home," for there was a door in the work-kitchen leading directly to the street. Good Aunt Lovey was no more discomposed by the bold stare the "help" fixed upon her, than she had been by the rest of the picture. It must have cost her an inward tremor to lay down her dove-colored cashmere shawl and split straw bonnet with its white satin ribbons, on the littered bureau, but she did so without invitation, Mrs. Bunker having fairly forgotten to offer one in the combined annoyances and embarrassments of the moment, and then, seated in the rocking-chair, from which her niece had risen, she spread the cradle blanket in her lap, and held out her hands for the baby.