"That was you and me," Nell explained, contentedly. "Well, you are a vain old boy!" "No interruptions, please," Ted went on, pulling at his pipe. "Although the occasion was one of rejoicing, there was a melancholy circumstance connected with it which cast a shadow over the otherwise sunshiny--'m--sunshine of the scene." "You're as bad as a newspaper. Go on softly, or you'll never keep it up. I can't think what's coming." "The guests sat down thirteen to table----" "Well, so they did!" Nell recalled. "Now, that is really very clever of you, Ted. I'd quite forgotten. I was horribly frightened then--but I'd as clean as clean forgotten!" "Well, there you are!" Ted said. "There's your moral." "Where? Where?" "Why, here we are, all alive and well and kicking; you and me, your daddy and mummy, your uncles and your cousins and your aunts." "But supposing one of us wasn't!" Nell remarked sagely. "When you ask your thirteen to dinner and one dies it must be horrid; and I should think your guests might--might bring an action against you." She was holding the hand he had just put up to meet hers, which was round his neck now, and a thought suddenly struck her. "But the year isn't up yet, Ted," she said. The dinner had been an epoch in their young lives; they both remembered the date was the eighteenth of October. He pointed to the silver calendar on the chimney-piece, to which the parlour-maid attended. "This is the eighteenth again," Ted said. "There aren't two eighteenths of October in one year." Elinor was back in memories of the event. "Do you remember Aunt Carrie, and how ill she was? At the very verge of the grave. And how afraid mummy was she should notice there were thirteen? Now, here she is as well as any of us, and going to get married again. Ah! What are you doing, Ted? "No, Ted! Oh, no, please! My hair will come down!" "I'm getting another hairpin." It was such pretty hair, he was always pleased to see it hanging about her ears, as had been its fashion when he had first met her--not so long ago. So he fought her for the hairpin while she ducked her head and threw it backwards, and laughed, and struggled in his grasp; to submit, of course, at last, to yield up the hairpin, to roast it, red hot in the fire, to watch it burn its malodorous passage through his pipe. That ceremony over, she got him his boots, and would have laced them for him, and kissed them too, if he would have let her, and did grovel at his feet to arrange the roll of his stockings for him. "You _have_ got nice calves, Ted!" she told him. "I don't think I could love even you if you had sticks of things like Robert Anstey's." "Oh, Bob's legs'll do all right," Ted said, loyally. He stamped a foot into the second boot, and in doing so ground some of the broken vase beneath his heel. He filliped her cheek, then, smiling into her eyes--