They rose, bowed coldly to Nell, and rustled from the room, accompanied by Denis. Ted stood a moment, hesitating. Nell held out her hand. "Good-bye, Ted." "Good-bye." He turned and strode from the room. "Come early to-morrow!" she called, following him. "Say, Lancaster, you might have given these steps a rub if you’d been able to stay," came Denis’s musical voice. And Nell ran back into the drawing-room, subsided into a chair, and laughed. Denis came back fairly shouting. "Oh, aren’t they rich? Their faces!—I feel quite exhausted—have I swelled with compressed laughter, Nell? Let’s open the windows! I can’t stand that scent." She sat up, wiping her eyes. "I think it’s horrid to laugh! Poor Ted!" "Hard lines for him. Sarah’s more refined than they are." "I’m afraid he felt awfully bad, Denis. He looked so horribly grim. I’m worried about him." "That’s why you’re weeping!" She began to smile again. "I can’t help it. They were so horribly, rudely funny! Poor old Ted." *CHAPTER XXIII* "I was thinking, miss," said Sarah, "as ’ow the bit of beef would ’ash nicely." "Beef bone, you mean, Sarah?" Sarah looked uncomfortable; she picked up a corner of her apron and pleated it uneasily. "Well, you see, miss, we’ve been using up a lot of things lately—" Nell laughed lightly. "Sarah, are you telling me I eat too much?" "No, miss." Sarah sighed, hesitated. "But it do run away with things ’aving folks to meals!" she blurted out. "Oh, miss, I beg your parding!" she gasped, aghast at the change in Nell’s face. "We will have the beef bone for lunch, with potatoes and bread!" said Nell, tragically, and marched upstairs to the Stronghold, where Denis was mending a shelf before rushing off to the bank. "Denis,"—her soft voice rushed it all out in wild indignation,—"we have been insulted! We’re not to invite Ted here to meals any more! Nor anyone else! We’re to bundle them off without letting them eat or drink beneath this hateful, mean, petty little roof! That’s what it has come to now!" "By Jove, Nell! what’s it all mean?" "It means that we’ve been using up too much of Aunt Kezia’s money! The accounts were to run till she came back, whatever that means! But this morning Sarah warned me—_me!_—that having folks to meals do run away with things so!" She ended with a shaky little laugh. "That all? What on earth does it matter what a well-meaning but silly little hap’orth says?" "But—Denis—it isn’t our money, you see!" He banged a nail into the shelf. "I may be a thief, but I’ll never turn my friends away, Nell O’Brien!" She laughed gaily. "I know! I’ll make Sarah tell me the exact amount Aunt Kezia spends in a week, and we’ll keep horrible accounts, and never go beyond it! At least, with her money. When we get to the end of that, we’ll pay for the things with our own money, and live on bread and water and all that sort of thing!" "We will, my twin, we will! You’re a genius."