He looked at her surprised. "It’s awfully good of you," he said in his quiet voice, and Molly’s hot cheeks cooled. "I shall be awfully pleased to call you ’Molly,’ Molly." "You’re not to call me Sheila Pat," declared the Atom, her pig-tail at an acute angle. "I should not think of taking such a liberty, Miss Sheila Patricia Kathleen O’Brien." "I’ve made some toffee," said Nell. "Are you fond of it? It’s too soft to eat yet," digging a knife into it. "Oh, I say, is it at the stage where it pulls into long strips when you try to bite it, and catches on your nose and mouth and everywhere?" She nodded. "Let me have a bit, will you? I haven’t had it like that since I was a kid and my old nurse used to make it." Presently, with his teeth stuck together and his fingers all sticky, he seemed supremely happy. "_I_ prefer toffee the proper way," observed the Atom, nose in air. "_I’m_ not a baby to want it all soft for my teeth!" "Ah," said Ted, "you will soon, when your milk teeth begin to wabble before they fall out." The Atom was observed surreptitiously feeling her little white teeth. "Nell," quoth Denis, "I’ve just washed my hands. Feed me, asthore. Think I’m a little, little birdie—ah!" He stopped abruptly, and his cheek shone round and tight over Nell’s liberal interpretation of his request. But, liberal as it was, it did not seem to affect his appetite for tea. Nell’s cakes all vanished; more toast had to be made, and Ted called down a good deal of laughter at his clumsiness over the business of toasting. Once Miss Kezia sent Sarah up to request that there should be "less noise." Ted’s face of whimsical amusement delighted Nell. Denis issued a mandate that it should be a "rhyming tea." He explained to Ted:— "You mustn’t speak except in rhyme. Everything you say must rhyme somehow—twig?" "Oh, I say," Ted’s eyebrows were stuck up. "I can’t, you know! Never made a rhyme in my life!" "That’s the fun!" declared Nell, and he pondered her cryptic utterance ruefully. It was "fun." Ted’s awful and desperate rhymes made them shout with laughter. He mournfully dubbed Denis a beastly poet, and eyed him with reproach. Then suddenly his face cleared. With a bland gravity he asked Nell to have a cake, and left the request rhymeless. To the chorus of "Rhyme! Rhyme!" he responded amiably that he was speaking in blank verse, and from the refuge of blank verse they could not move him. In vain the Atom, her metre waxing wilder and wilder, as her indignation grew, in vain she strove to shame him into rhyming. He gazed at her with ever increasing enjoyment. To her madly rhyming vituperation he responded with gentle obstinacy. And he stuck to his blank verse like an Englishman, and a very unpoetical one. "Oh!" exclaimed Nell, later on in the evening, "I want to show you something. Now, you remember our broken purchases the other day? Behold the legless doll!"