The old lady looked relieved and pleased when they were well on their way.
“It is a lovely drive,” she said, “and it will do you far more good than sitting on the pier. I am so glad to have you with me, dear children.” She seemed to delight in calling them children, and it was odd, but each time that she said the word it seemed to give her a stronger hold on them. She turned to Florence.
“Are your father and mother quite well, my dear?” she asked, and waited with polite eagerness for a reply.
Walter put his hand on his wife’s.
“She only has a mother,” he said gently.
Aunt Anne looked quite penitent. She winked with her left eye and was silent for a moment or two, almost as if she meditated shedding a tear for the defunct father of the niece by marriage whom she had never seen in her life before to-day. Suddenly she turned the subject so grotesquely that they nearly laughed.
“Are you fond of chocolates, my darling?”
“Yes——” Florence hesitated a minute and then said softly, “Yes, Aunt Anne, very”—she had not had occasion to give the old lady any name in the few words she had spoken previously.
“Dear child, I knew you would be,” Aunt Anne said, and from under her shawl she produced a box covered with white satin paper and having on its lid a very bright picture of a very smart lady. “I bought that box of chocolates for you as I came along. I thought Florence would be like the picture on the lid,” she added, turning to her nephew; “and she is, don’t you think so, Walter dear?”
“Yes, Aunt Anne, she is—it is a most beautiful lady,” he answered, and he looked fondly at his wife and drew up his lips a little bit in a manner that Florence knew meant, in the language only she and he in all the wide world understood, that in his thoughts he kissed her.