Mrs. Roberts: “Oh yes, so it does. How ridiculous! But now I _must_ run away and leave you, or I never shall get back in time. Be sure to speak to the cook as soon as she comes in, or she’ll get discouraged and go away again; you can’t depend on them for an instant; I told her _you_ would be here to meet her, if I wasn’t--I thought I might be late; and you mustn’t let her slip. And if the Campbells happen to get here before I’m back, don’t you give them the least inkling of our having just engaged a cook. I’m going to smuggle her into the house without Amy’s knowing it; I wouldn’t have her know it for the world. She prides herself on keeping that impudent, spoiled thing of hers, with her two soups; and she would simply never stop crowing if she knew I’d had to change cooks in the middle of the summer.” Roberts, picking up and dropping the multitudinous packages, and finally sitting down with them all in his lap, very red and heated: “I’ll be careful, my dear.” Mrs. Roberts: “How flushed you are, bending over! You’re so stout now, you ought to bend sidewise; it’s perfect folly, your trying to bend _straight_ over; you’ll get apoplexy. But now I _must_ run, or I shall never be back in the world. Don’t forget to look out for the cook!” Roberts, at whom she glances with misgiving as she runs out, holding the parcels on his knees with both elbows and one hand, and contriving with the help of his chin to get his magazine open again: “No, no; I won’t, my dear.” He loses himself in his reading, while people come and go restlessly. A gentleman finally drops into the seat beside him, and contemplates his absorption with friendly amusement. II. _ROBERTS AND WILLIS CAMPBELL_ Campbell: “Don’t mind _me,_ Roberts.” Roberts, looking up: “Heigh? What! Why, Willis! Glad to see you--” Campbell: “Now that you _do_ see me, yes, I suppose you are. What have you got there that makes you cut all your friends?” He looks at Roberts’s open page. “Oh! _Popular Science Monthly._ Isn’t Agnes a little afraid of your turning out an agnostic? By-the-way, where _is_ Agnes?” Roberts: “She left her purse at Stearns’s, and she’s gone back after it. Where’s Amy?” Campbell: “Wherever she said she wouldn’t be at the moment. I expected to find her here with you and Agnes. What time did you say your train started?” Roberts. “At ten minutes to four. And, by-the-way--I’d almost forgotten it--I must keep an eye out for the cook Agnes has been engaging. She was to meet us here before half-past two, and I shall have to receive her. You mustn’t tell Amy; Agnes doesn’t want her to know she’s been changing cooks; and I’ve got to be very vigilant not to let her give us the slip, or you won’t have any dinner to-night.” Campbell: “Is that so? Well, that interests _me._ Were you expecting to find her in the _Pop. Sci._?” Roberts: “Oh, I’d only been reading a minute when you came in.”