The Squire took another ladleful. He went once or twice to every dish, and drank champagne with all of us. But still Robert Ashton did not come. I slipped round to Mrs. Coney when the plum-pudding appeared, whispering that I would take a slice to Jane. "So you shall, Johnny," she said, giving me some on a plate, and putting a mince-pie beside it. "She will have no luck unless she eats a little of both pudding and pie on the first day of the year." Jane sat in a low elbow-chair before the fire, her head leaning on her hand, her hair a little tumbled. It was very pretty hair, dark chestnut, and her eyes were hazel. Robert Ashton was fair-haired and blue-eyed; Saxon all over, and very good-looking. "I have brought you some pudding, Jane." "Oh, Johnny! why did you leave the table? I can't eat it." "But Mrs. Coney says you are to; and some mince-pie also, or you'll have no luck." As if in obedience she ate a little of the pudding, cut a quarter of the mince-pie with her fork, and ate that. "There, Johnny, that's quite enough for 'luck.' Go back now to your dinner; I dare say you've not had any pudding yourself." "I'll stay with you, and finish this: as it is going begging." She neither said yes nor no. She was looking frightfully uneasy. "Are you vexed that Robert Ashton's not here, Jane?" "I am not vexed, because I know he would have been here if he could. I think something has happened to him." I stared at her. "What! because he is a little late in coming? Why, Jane, you must be nervous." She kept looking into the fire, her eyes fixed. I sat on a stool on the other side of the hearth; the empty pudding-plate standing on the rug between us, where I had put it. "Robert was _sure_ to come for this dinner, Johnny, all being well, and to be in time." "Tell me what you fear, Jane--and why?" "I think I will tell you," she said, after a pause. "I should like to tell some one. I wish I had told Robert when he called this morning; but I was afraid he would laugh at me. You will laugh too." And Jane Coney told it. In a low, dread voice, her eyes staring into the fire as before, just as though they could see through the blaze into the future. Early that morning she had had a dream; a disagreeable, ugly dream about Robert Ashton. She thought he was in some frightful peril, that she cried to him to avoid it, or it would stop their marriage. He seemed not to take the least notice of her, but to go right on to it, and in the alarm this brought her, she awoke. I listened in silence, saying nothing to the end; no, nor then. "The dream was so intensely _real_, Johnny. It seemed to be to-day; this very day then dawning; and we both of us knew that it was; the one before our marriage. I woke up in a fever; and but that it was night and not day, should have had difficulty in persuading myself at first that we were not really enacting the scene--it was, as I say, so vividly real. And Robert went out to the peril, never heeding me."