to see how the son would take the damp so
vexatiously cast on his projects.

He made the gesture that Mrs. Frost called debonnaire--read on for five
minutes in silence, insisted on teaching his aunt the cause of the
colours in peacock ores, compared them to a pigeon's neck, and talked
of old Betty Gervas's tame pigeons; whence he proceeded to memories of
the days that he and Mary had spent together, and asked which of their
old haunts she had revisited. Had she been into the nursery?

'Oh yes! but I wondered you had sent the old walnut press into that
lumber-room.'

'Is that satire?' said Louis, starting and looking in her face.

'I don't know what you mean.'

'I have a better right to ask what you mean by stigmatizing my
apartment as a lumber-room?'

'It was only what I saw from the door,' said Mary, a little confused,
but rallying and answering with spirit; 'and I must maintain that, if
you mean the room over the garden entrance, it is very like a
lumber-room.'

'Ah, Mary! you have not outgrown the delusions of your sex. Is an
Englishman's house his castle while housemaids maraud over it,
ransacking his possessions, irritating poor peaceful dust that only
wants to be let alone, sweeping away cherished cobwebs?'

'Oh, if you cherish cobwebs!' said Mary.

'Did not the fortunes of Scotland hang on a spider's thread? Did not a
cobweb save the life of Mahomet, or Ali, or a mediaeval saint--no
matter which? Was not a spider the solace of the Bastille? Have not I
lain for hours on a summer morning watching the tremulous lines of the
beautiful geometrical composition?'

'More shame for you!' said Mary, with a sort of dry humorous bluntness.

'The very answer you would have made in old times,' cried Louis,
delighted. 'O Mary, you bring me back the days of my youth! You never
would see the giant who used to live in that press!'

'I remember our great fall from the top of it.'

'Oh yes!' cried Louis; 'Jem Frost had set us up there bolt upright for
sentries, and I saw the enemies too soon, when you would not allow that
they were there. I was going to fire my musket at them; but you used
violence to keep me steady to my duty--pulled my hair, did not you?'

'I know you scratched me, and we both rolled off together! I wonder we
were not both killed!'

'That did not trouble Jem! He picked us up, and ordered us into arrest
under the bed for breach of discipline.'

'I fear Jem was a martinet,' said Mrs. F