"What on earth have you got there?" says his friend, sticking his eyeglass in his eye, and staring with bent head and some suspicion at the mysterious thing in Desmond's arms. "This! oh, ah! yes." Then, desperately, "Kelly, if you laugh at it I'll never forgive you." Mr. Kelly drops the eyeglass and looks afflicted. "My dear fellow, do I _ever_ laugh?" he says. "Well, it--it's _a cake_!" says Brian, who (in spite of the warning just delivered to his friend) is now indulging in wild mirth and can scarcely speak for laughter. "She--Monica--heard we were boycotted, and, thinking we were starving, the dear angel! she brought this up herself to us." "Desmond, I'm ashamed of you," says Kelly, who has not moved a muscle of his face. "Such an action as hers calls for reverence,--not this unseemly gayety." "It's not the action I'm laughing at," says Brian, still convulsed; "it's the _cake_. The action is divine--the cake hot!" Here he sinks upon the garden-seat again, as if exhausted, and dries his eyes. "I see nothing to laugh at in that, either. It seems an excellent cake, and, as you say, _hot_," says Mr. Kelly, prodding it meditatively with his finger,--"a merit in a cake of this sort, I should say; and nicely browned, too, as far as I can see. I can see, too, that it is quite the biggest cake I ever made acquaintance with. _Another_ merit! Did she carry it herself all the way?" "All the way, poor darling! and just because she was afraid we should be hungry." Mr. Desmond's laughter has subsided, and he now looks rather absent. "It quite weighed her down," he says, in a low tone. "Poor child! I said yesterday, you remember, that I thought her one of the nicest girls I have met. The cake has finished me. I think her now _the_ nicest." He says this with a cheerful conscience. Between girls and widows a deep margin lies. "But what are we to do with it?" says Brian, regarding the cake, which is now lying upon the garden seat, with a puzzled expression. "Say a repentant tenant--no, that sounds like tautology--say a remorseful tenant brought it to you." "That wouldn't do at all." "Then say you found it in the garden." "Nonsense, Kelly! they don't _grow_. Think of something more plausible." "Give me time, then." As he speaks he absently breaks off a piece of the cake and puts it in his mouth. Desmond, in quite as abstracted a manner, does likewise. Silence ensues. "I think the idea was so sweet," says Desmond, presently, his thoughts being (as they should be) with Monica. "As honey and the honeycomb!" says Mr. Kelly, breaking off another piece, with a far-off, rapt expression. "She said she couldn't be happy, thinking we were hungry. Her dear heart is too big for her body." "Her cake is certainly," says Mr. Kelly: here he takes a third enormous pinch out of it, and Desmond follows his example. "I didn't tell her we had had dinner," says Brian. "It would have taken the gloss off it."