Mrs. Bertram rang a little tinkling handbell, and a decent old woman—who must surely have been what is called ‘upon the listen,’ or she could hardly have heard that feeble summons—appeared with a tea-tray, and spread the neat little table with the best china teacups, a brown home-baked loaf, the yellowest of butter-pats, the richest of cream in a little glass jug, a great wedge of golden honeycomb, a few ripe apricots nestling in a bed of mulberry leaves,—a repast at once Arcadian and picturesque. ‘But perhaps you may not care for such a womanish beverage as orange pekoe,’ said Janet doubtfully, as Mr. Hossack surveyed the banquet from his altitude of something over six feet, the kitten still promenading his shoulder. ‘Not care for tea! Why, on the shores of the Saskatchewan the teapot was our only comfort,’ exclaimed Geoffrey. ‘We had a cask or two of rum with us, and had no end of trouble in hiding it from the Indians; but they got the most of the fire-water out of us sooner or later, by hook or by crook. We rarely took any of it ourselves, except as a medicine. Travellers are a temperate race, I can assure you, Mrs. Bertram.’ They sat down to tea, the kitten now perambulating the backs of their chairs, now sending forth appealing miaws for milk or other refreshment. Geoffrey, who had been too much out of humour with the world in general to do justice to Lady Baker’s luncheon, was ravenous, and devoured bread-and-honey like the queen in the nursery rhyme, of which Flossie did not fail to remind him. It was the first meal he had ever eaten with the woman he loved. That fragrant tea was more intoxicating than Lady Baker’s choicest Johannisberger or Steinberger. He forgot that he was perhaps no nearer a happy issue to his suit than he had been that day in the botanical gardens at Stillmington, when he made his first desperate appeal to his inexorable goddess; he forgot everything except the present moment—this innocent rustic interior, the fair-haired child, whose gay laugh rang out every now and then, the perambulatory kitten, the perfect face of the woman he loved, smiling at him with that proud slow smile he knew so well. ‘So you went back to Stillmington,’ Janet said presently, when Geoffrey had appeased the pangs of hunger with the contents of the honeycomb and the crustiest side of the home-baked loaf, and had consumed three cups of that exquisite tea. ‘Went back!’ repeated Geoffrey; ‘of course I went back. I should have gone back exactly the same if Stillmington had been in the centre of Africa, or on the top of Elburz. How cruel of you to leave no address! They told me you had gone to the seaside.’