"Well, _'twas_ my salt-cellar," says Tommy again stoutly, and as if totally undismayed by the vision of the grand-fatherly scourge held out to him. After all we none of us feel things much, unless they come personally home to us. "Was it?" says Mr. Monkton mildly. "Do you know, I really quite fancied it was mine." "What?" says Tommy, cocking his ear. He, like his sister, is in a certain sense a fraud. For Tommy has the face of a seraph with the heart of a hardy Norseman. There is nothing indeed that Tommy would not dare. "Mine, you know," says his father, even more mildly still. "No, it wasn't," says Tommy with decision, "it was at _my_ side of the table. _Yours_ is over there." "Thomas!" says his father, with a rueful shake of the head that signifies his resignation of the argument; "it is indeed a pity that I am _not_ like my father!" "Like him! Oh _no_," says Mrs. Monkton emphatically, impulsively; the latent dislike to the family who had refused to recognize her on her marriage with their son taking fire at this speech. Her voice sounds almost hard--the gentle voice, that in truth was only meant by Mother Nature to give expression to all things kind and loving. She has leant a little forward and a swift flush is dyeing her cheek. She is of all women the youngest looking, for her years; as a matron indeed she seems absurd. The delicate bloom of girlhood seems never to have left her, but--as though in love of her beauty--has clung to her day by day. So that now, when she has known eight years of married life (and some of them deeply tinctured with care--the cruel care that want of money brings), she still looks as though the morning of womanhood was as yet but dawning for her. And this is because love the beautifier went with her all the way! Hand in hand he has traveled with her on the stony paths that those who marry must undoubtedly pursue. Never once had he let go his hold, and so it is, that her lovely face has defied Time (though after all that obnoxious Ancient has not had yet much opportunity given him to spoil it), and at twenty-five she looks but a little older than her sister, who is just eighteen, and seven years younger than she is. Her pretty soft grey Irish eyes, that are as nearly _not_ black as it is possible for them to be, are still filled with the dews of youth. Her mouth is red and happy. Her hair--so distinctly chestnut as to be almost guilty of a shade of red in it here and there--covers her dainty head in rippling masses, that fall lightly forward, and rest upon a brow, snow-white, and low and broad as any Greek's might be. She had spoken a little hurriedly, with some touch of anger. But quick as the anger was born, so quickly does it die. "I shouldn't have said that, perhaps," says she, sending a little tremulous glance at her husband from behind the urn. "But I couldn't help it. I can't _bear_ to hear you say you would like to be like him."