When day is deepening into eventide, Monica, finding Kit alone, kneels down beside her, and lays her cheek to hers. All day long she has been brooding miserably over her lover's danger, and dwelling with foolish persistency upon future dangers born of her terrified imagination. She had been down to their trysting-place at the river, hardly hoping to find him there, yet had been terribly disappointed when she had _not_ found him, Brian at that very moment being busy with police and magistrates and law generally. "What is it, ducky?" says Kit, very tenderly, laying down her book and pressing her pretty sister close to her. "Kit," says Monica, with tearful eyes, "_do_ you think it is all true that Timothy said this morning about their--their _starving_ at Coole? Oh Kit, I can't bear to think he is _hungry_!" "It is dreadful! I don't know what to think," says Kit. "If nobody will sell them anything, I suppose they have nothing to eat." At this corroboration of her worst fears, Monica dissolves into tears. "I couldn't eat my chicken at lunch, thinking of him," she sobs. "It stuck in my throat." "Poor sweet love!--it _was_ dry," says Kit, expanding into the wildest affection. She kisses Monica fondly, and (though you would inevitably have suffered death at her hands had you even hinted at it) is beginning to enjoy herself intensely. Once again this luckless couple look to _her_ for help. She is to be the one to raise them from their "Slough of Despond,"--difficult but congenial task! "Then you have been existing on lemon tart and one glass of sherry since breakfast time?" she says, with the deepest commiseration. "Poor darling! I saw it; I noticed you ate nothing _except_ the tart. You liked that, didn't you?" "I didn't," says Monica. "I _hated_ it. And I was a cruel, cold-hearted wretch to _touch_ it. But it was sweet--and--I--it--somehow disappeared." "It did," says Kit, tenderly. "Oh, Kit, help me!" "You mean you want to take him something wherewith to stave off the pangs of hunger," says the younger Miss Beresford, with that grandeur of style she usually affects in moments of strong excitement, and with the vigor that distinguishes her. "I see; certainly." She grows abstracted. "There's a leg of mutton hanging in the larder, with some fowl, and a quarter of lamb," she says, presently. "But I suppose if we took _them_, Aunt Priscilla would put us in the hue and cry." "It mustn't be thought of. No, no; think of something else." "Bread, then. Ordinary, of course, very ordinary, but yet the staff of life." "I _couldn't_ take him anything so nasty as mere bread," says Monica, in despair. "But, if cook would make us a cake----" "A big one, with currants! The very _thing_!" says Kit, with decision. "And she will never betray us. Reilly, in little affairs of this kind,--though sadly wanting where soups are concerned,--is quite all she ought to be."