I found on reaching home that evening that Pepper's "small parcel" was really two, the larger one about the size of an ordinary bureau, the smaller one perhaps no bigger than a tea-chest. As both were addressed to me, neither had been opened; but I really feared that this severe continence had done both Evie and her aunt an injury--so much so that I mercifully cut short my affectation of not noticing the huge packages. "If he's not going to sit down without opening them!" cried Evie, revolted. "And a hammer and chisel put ready to his hand----!" "Oh, these things," I said. "They're from Pepper, I suppose. Do you want them opened at once?" "Do we want----! Open them instantly!" "Well, I can't in here----" I carried the boxes out into our tiny verandah-roofed yard, and there prised the lids off. Then I fell back before the onslaught they made on the straw with which the cases were filled. The smaller one contained a silver-mounted champagne-cooler; the larger one two enormous branched silver candlesticks, big enough to have furnished the table that stood before the Ark of the Covenant. So splendid were they that Evie, seeing them, did not dare to touch them; and I remember how Pepper had said that they would be useful by-and-by--which, I may say, they were. "Hm!" I said. "Well, we'd better pawn 'em at once. We've certainly nowhere to put them." And indeed, the objects, the cases they came in, and ourselves, almost cubically filled the little yard. Besides taking the shine completely out of the rest of the house, they cost me getting on towards a pound of candles that night, for of course we had to have another grand illumination in their honour; but Pepper only laughed when I told him. "I'm setting you a scale of living, my boy," he said. "If you spend a lot you've got to make a lot--that's all about it." "Well, I'll be even with you," I replied, "for your champagne-cooler's going to be my waste-paper basket." And so it was, for long enough. In this "setting me a scale of living" Pepper was aided and abetted by Pettinger, for if the candlesticks of the one meant the extravagance of candles, so did the two great china bowls of the other a constant expenditure of money on flowers. The only immediate profit I had of any of these magnificences was a plentiful supply of firewood. The cases they all came in, when knocked to pieces, made quite a respectable stack of timber. There were only a couple more wedding presents that I need particularise. The first of these puzzled us for a long time. It came by letter post, a small, soft parcel addressed to Evie, containing a crochet-bordered teacloth; and except for an "L." written on a blank card, there was no indication of who the sender might be. Then I remembered Miss Levey. "Of course--how stupid not to think of it!" said Evie. "I'll write her a note at once, and you can give it to her to-morrow." "Oh--we'll spend a penny on it," I said.