"I--I--don't want to do without you," said Kitty at last. He was holding her hands fast, and she was trying, not very earnestly, perhaps, to pull them away. The pair made a pretty picture. "Oh, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!" he said softly, and then the door opened, and suddenly, without the least warning, a middle-aged lady became a spectator of the little tableau. The newcomer wore a mantle with beads on it, a black bonnet wherein nodded a violet flower--and beads and flower and bonnet were absolutely familiar to each of the astonished ones now standing consciously with the breadth of the office between them. For in that middle-aged lady the editor recognised Aunt Kate, the pleasant, sensible, companionable woman who for years had written those sympathetic "Answers to Correspondents" in the _Girls' Very Own Friend_. And at the same moment Kitty recognised, beyond all possibility of doubt, Aunt Eliza--her own grim, harsh, uncongenial Aunt Eliza. Kitty cowered--in her frightened soul she cowered. But her little figure drew itself up, and the point of her chin rose a quarter of an inch. "Aunt Eliza," she said firmly, "I know you will----" "_Your Aunt Eliza_, Kitty?" cried the editor. "'Kitty'?" said the aunt. And now the situation hung all too nicely balanced on the extreme edge of the absolutely impossible. Would this middle-aged lady--an aunt beyond doubt--an aunt who so long had played a double _role_, assume, now that one _role_ must be chosen, the part of Aunt Eliza the Terrible or of Aunt Kate the Kind? The aunt was dumb. Kitty was dumb. But the editor had his wits about him, and Kate, though shaken, was not absolutely paralysed. "It's almost too good to be true," he said, "that _my_ Aunt Kate is really _your_ Aunt Eliza. Aunt Kate, Kitty and I have just decided that we can't do without each other. I am so glad that you are the first to wish us joy." At his words all the "Kate" in the aunt rose triumphant, trampling down the "Eliza." "My dear boy," she said--and she said it in a voice which Kitty had never heard before--the sound of that voice drew Kitty like a magnet. She did the only possible thing--she put her arms timidly round her aunt's neck and whispered: "Oh, don't be Aunt Eliza any more, be Aunt Kate!" It was Aunt Kate's arms undoubtedly that went round the girl. Certainly not Aunt Eliza's. "I will take a walk down Fleet Street," said the editor discreetly. Then there were explanations in the office. "But why," said Kitty, when all the questions had been asked and answered, "why were you Aunt Eliza to me, and Aunt Kate to him?"