"Miss Sweetheart--Miss Sweetheart!" he said, "what a blind old hedge-carpenter ye must have thought me! And you your own folks' daughter, and your father treating me like a long-lost brother, _and_ instructin' me on hist'ry and the use of the globes!" So we had tea, the prettiest little tea imaginable, with Mrs. Donnan going about as soft-footed as a pussy cat, and purring like one too. Butcher Donnan looked after her with a kind of sudden bitterness. "It's all very well for _her_," he said; "she makes her life out of such things, but what is there for me to do? I'm about at the end of my tether!" "Why, _help her_!" said I. "Help her!" he muttered, not understanding. "Me, Butcher Donnan--why, the girl is mazed! I can't do housework!" [Illustration: "HELP HER! ME, BUTCHER DONNAN!"] But I soon showed him I was not so mazed as he thought. He was tired of doing nothing. He wanted a change. Very well then; here was this little house right at the top of Edam Common, with the railway station opposite, and everybody's business taking him that way two or three times a day. What Edam wanted was a confectioner's shop. His wife was dying to have one. He would look a fine figure of a man in a white overall and cap! Hugh John had said it! He whistled softly, and his little, deep-set eyes twinkled. "I might ha' known," he said, "when I saw that long-legged brother of yours looking at me as if to calculate what I was good for. He's the fellow to make plans. Now the other----" Here he laughed as he remembered Sir Toady Lion. "More like me when I was his age!" he said. "But about the pastry-cook foolishness. What put that into his head?" "It isn't foolishness," I answered, "and nobody that I know of ever puts anything into Hugh John's head!" "He certainly is a wonder!" ("Corker" was what he _said_.) Then I explained. One side of the villa was certainly expressly designed for a shop, the drawing-room and back drawing-room having side connections with the kitchen, only needed to be fitted with shelves and counters. The other side of the house and all above stairs might remain intact. To my surprise Mr. Donnan never said a word concerning his position, his political aspirations, his illuminations, and disporting of the green harp of Ireland. "But what are we to do with Cynthia's parlor furniture?" he asked instead. I could see a look of joy flash across his wife's face. "Donnan," she said, "we will make the empty room above into a parlor. It's a perfect god-send. That boy should be paid by Government to make plans for people!" Butcher Donnan bent his brows a moment on his wife. "Oh, you are in it, are you, Cynthia? Then I suppose I may as well go and order my white apron and cap?" "Think how well they will become you!" said his wife, who also must have kissed the Blarney stone--the old one, not the new.