As she handed the soup she decorated each plate with a beautiful scallop like a flannel petticoat. I suppose it is difficult to keep liquid level and walk at the same time. She had put no fish forks on the table, so I said reprovingly,— ’What are we to eat the fish with, Hilda?’ ’Oh, whatever you like, Mrs Ellsley,’ she said brightly. Ross drank some water hurriedly. I endeavoured to make my meaning clearer and to keep my face straight at the same time, whereupon ’My ’Ilda’ said,— ’I do like being here; you don’t mind how many mistakes I make so long as I do it right.’ She shot a knife and fork into Ross’s lap, mercifully they were clean or there would have been ructions, then she upset a glass of water and got the hiccoughs, and later tripped over the footstool and sent the cheese straws flying like leaves before an autumn gale. When ’My ’Ilda’ brought the coffee into the hall she stepped on the kitten’s tail, and as that indignant fluffy ball spat at her, she remarked,— ’My! ain’t Fitzbattleaxe got a temper, I don’t think. Your face _is_ red, Mrs Ellsley; did I do it all right at dinner?’ As I went to my room to fetch a book I heard her fall down the back stairs with a pail. It was the end of an imperfect meal. Ross says I ought to start a nursing home for sergeant-majors suffering from depression—they’d be cured in a week, and then he remarked,— ’I wonder if Sam’s got a decent supper. I must go and see.’ When he came down again he tossed a little box into my lap and said,— ’Why didn’t you tell _me_ that you wanted a new necklace? I’d have loved to give you one.’ ’What _do_ you mean, Ross?’ ’Michael wrote to me to-day that you had said you wanted a "new necklace for yourself" directly the cave was finished, and that I was to buy you one.’ Oh, isn’t he absurd and dear? So I opened the box, and inside there were two to choose from. So I chose the one of very perfect pearls, and then for some extraordinary reason of his own Ross kissed me and said,— ’_How_ Michael spoils you, darling.’ But two kisses in twelve days. He must be ill, I think. *CHAPTER XVIII* It’s All Fools’ Day. Perhaps that’s why the Titmouse elected to get the rheumatics that come from damp attics, so that I had to tell the Stench what ’to be getting on with.’ As I walked round the garden with him I asked if all the seeds were in. ’In, an’ coming up by the galore, mum, an’ I’ve given the turnips a dressin’ of soot, as it makes a vast difference to ’em on their first appearance through the soil, mum.’ I could well believe it! ’I think you’d better dig the bed in front of the kitchen window then.’ ’How deep, mum, two spits?’ I hadn’t the foggiest notion how deep that is, but I said,— ’Oh, yes, _of course_, dig down as deep as ever you can; you can’t dig too deep, Stench—Tench, I mean!’ Ross thinks he knows a bit about gardening, so at lunch I said,— ’Ross, how big is a spit?’