What was it, that delighted sense of congruity that filled him, every passing second, with keener familiarity, so strangely tinged with sorrow and regret? Ah, he had it! He bit his lip as it came clear to him. His little namesake nephew, dead at eight years old, and dear as only a dearly loved child can be, had delighted greatly in the Kate Greenaway pictures that came in “painting-books,” with colored prints on alternate pages and corresponding outlines on the others. Dozens of those books the boy had cleverly filled in with his little japanned paint-box and mussy, quill-handled brushes; and the scene before him, the rich tints of the hedge, the symmetrical little tree brilliant with hundreds of tiny globes, the big white apron, the lazy yellow cats, and everywhere the prim rectangular lines so amusingly conventional to accentuate the likeness, almost choked him with the suddenness of the recognition. They must have colored that very picture a dozen times, Tommy and he. Half unconsciously he rested his arms on the top of the gate and drifted into revery. He forgot that he was at Wilton Bluffs, one of the greatest of the country palaces, and lived for a while in a mingled vision of his boyhood on the old farm and in the land of the Greenaway painting-books. Suddenly a door opened into the green. A housemaid advanced to the table, bearing in both red hands a long tray covered with a napkin. On the napkin lay, heaped in rich confusion, a great pile of spicy, smoking brown cookies. “They're just out o' the oven,” she began, but Varian could contain himself no longer. He could not be deceived: he would have known those cookies in the Desert of Sahara. He crossed the little plot in three long steps, and faced the astonished maid. “I beg your pardon,” he said firmly, “but it is very necessary that I should have one of those cookies! I hope you can spare one?” She giggled convulsively. “I--I guess you can, sir,” she murmured, laying down the tray and retreating toward the house door. Varian faced the older woman, and, with hat still in hand, instinctively bowed lower; for this was no housekeeper--he was sure of that. Even as she met his eyes a great flood of pink rushed to her smooth forehead, and she dropped her lids as she bowed slightly. He reflected irrelevantly that he had never seen Mrs. Dudley blush in his life. “You are very welcome to all you wish, I am sure,” she said graciously. “I--I didn't know any one liked them but me. I always have them made for me--I taught her the rule. I always call them”--she laughed nervously, and it dawned on him that this woman was really shy and “talking against time,” as they said--“I always call them 'Aunt Delia's cookies.' They--” “Aunt Delia's cookies!” he interrupted. “What Aunt Delia?”