At this corroboration of her worst fears, Monica dissolves into tears.
"I couldn't eat my chicken at lunch, thinking of him," she sobs. "It stuck in my throat."
"Poor sweet love!—it was dry," says Kit, expanding into the wildest affection. She kisses Monica fondly, and (though you would inevitably have suffered death at her hands had you even hinted at it) is beginning to enjoy herself intensely . Once again this luckless couple look to her for help. She is to be the one to raise them from their "Slough of Despond,"—difficult but congenial task! "Then you have been existing on lemon tart and one glass of sherry since breakfast time?" she says, with the deepest commiseration. "Poor darling! I saw it; I noticed you ate nothing except the tart. You liked that, didn't you?"
"I didn't," says Monica. "I hated it. And I was a cruel, cold-hearted wretch to touch it. But it was sweet—and—I—it—somehow disappeared."
"It did," says Kit, tenderly.
"Oh, Kit, help me!"
"You mean you want to take him something wherewith to stave off the pangs of hunger," says the younger Miss Beresford, with that grandeur of style she usually affects in moments of strong excitement, and with the vigor that distinguishes her. "I see; certainly." She grows abstracted. "There's a leg of mutton hanging in the larder, with some fowl, and a quarter of lamb," she says, presently. "But I suppose if we took them, Aunt Priscilla would put us in the hue and cry."
"It mustn't be thought of. No, no; think of something else."
"Bread, then. Ordinary, of course, very ordinary, but yet the staff of life."
"I couldn't take him anything so nasty as mere bread," says Monica, in despair. "But, if cook would make us a cake——"