"He's asleep now, miss," answered the maid, closing her mouth for once in her life by some miracle of Love, and catching in her breath through her nose. "That will do, Susannah," hastily said her mistress, who knew this symptom of old, and what it foreboded; "I'll ring if I want you. Bring up the punch things at ten, just as you always bring them." Susannah left the room making stifled sounds, and Fanny, with Mrs Regan's fichu about her neck, attacked the sardine tin with the opener. "Let me," said Charles. "No, no; you open the champagne, and put the peaches on a plate, and I'll open the tins. Bring over the bread and butter and jam. I wish we had some ice for the champagne, but the fishmonger--forgot to send it. Bother this knife!" She laboured away, with her cheeks flushed; a lock of black hair hanging loose lent her a distracted air, and made her so lovely in the eyes of Charles that he put the bread platter down on top of the butter plate, so that the butter pat clung to the bottom of the bread platter, and they had to scrape it off, one holding the platter, one scraping with the knife, and both hands touching. "We have had that bread plate ever since I can remember," she said, as they seated themselves to the feast, "and I wouldn't have anything happen to it for earths, not that the butter will do it any harm. Isn't the text on it nice?" Charles examined the bread platter gravely. "'Want not,'" he read. He looked in vain for the "Waste not," but that part of the maxim was hidden by the carved representation of a full ear of corn. "It's a very nice--motto. Have some champagne?" "No thanks, I only drink water, wine flies to my head; I am like James. I am going to have a peach--have one." "Thank you, I am eating sardines. You remind me of the old gentleman--he was short-sighted--who offered me a pinch of snuff once when I was eating a sole." Fanny, with her teeth set in the peach, gave a little shriek of laughter, but Mr Bevan was perfectly grave. Still, for perhaps the first time in his life, he felt his possibilities as a humorist, and determined to exploit them. "Talking about ghosts"--ghosts and mothers-in-law, to the medium intellect, are always fair game,--"talking about ghosts," said he, "you said, I think, Cousin Fanny----" "Call me Fanny," said that lady, who, having eaten her peach, was now helping herself to sardines. "I hate that word 'cousin,' it sounds so stiff. What about ghosts?" "About ghosts," he answered slowly, his new-found sense of humour suddenly becoming lost. "Oh yes, you said, Fanny, that a ghost was haunting this house." "Yes, Fanny Lambert. I told you she hid her jewels before she hung herself. When people see her she is always beckoning them to follow her. We found James insensible one night on the landing upstairs; he told us next morning he had seen her, and she had beckoned him to follow her, and after that he remembered nothing more." "A sure sign there were spirits in the house."