“Not on your blooming passport! Where do I come in, with a deal like that? If anything results, does little Jimmy draw the prestige? No, no, I want to perform the quest by myself—with you, of course. Can’t ask any one else, my runabout won’t stand for it. After all, I’m furnishing an aunt; and I think I ought to have something to say.” “I’ll see how mother feels about it,” vouchsafed Flickey. She added to herself, “I’ll wear my pink-and-white stripe, with the rose blazer. But perhaps not the earrings—you never can tell about earrings—” III Late one July afternoon, Amanda Alexander Blakeney had ensconced herself with Queen Victoria in a shady corner of the terrace, and was looking forward to an hour of tranquil enjoyment with Lehzen’s caraway seeds, and Lord M. To her vexation, the very first paragraph was punctuated for her by footsteps on the brick walk; and peering through the pine boughs, she spied a gay young pair who had evidently just descended from a car, left in quite the wrong place in her courtyard. “I hope,” she said to herself, “it isn’t another brazen couple come to ask if this is a ‘gift-shop-’n’-tea-house,’ and can they have something wet. Well, they’ll hear from me, and—” A brisk voice broke in, man-fashion. “Hello, hello, Aunt Mandy! Anything wet for the weary prodigal nevvy?” “Well, of all things,” replied the great Museum authority on silver, beaming with pleasure upon her favorite Alexander nephew. Lord M. was readily enough forgotten in the vivid presence of the young people, and the subject of silver readily enough approached with the arrival of a tea-tray laden with various products reflecting credit alike upon the collector and her cook. Mrs. Blakeney was a childless widow, distinctly pretty, with a young face framed by abundant white hair. In her fresh lilac gown with its touches of old lace, and in her daintily buckled slippers, of a Victorian slenderness, she was, as Felicia afterwards declared, a “regular story-book fairy-godmother person.” Old silver was her love, her life, her knowledge. Everybody’s silver was of interest to her; she was always ready to talk or even to hear others talk concerning caudle cups or apostle spoons or salt-cellars or tankards. She gave a delicately amused attention to Flickey’s chatter of her father’s quest for the Lafayette bottom. The young girl naturally felt that her hostess’s interest was due, in part, to her own pleasing vivacity in telling the story of the child Lydia, the Fairlee porringer, Rover, and the evil Ellicksenders. At the mention of that name, _Ellicksender_, Mrs. Blakeney started, and even changed color; one would have said that a feeling of indignant protest surged over her when the “den of thieves” was blithely insisted upon by young Felicia; but the lady did not interrupt.