Later, they found that the butter was rank. Before Nell knew what he was going to do Denis had attacked Sarah about it and out came a voluble and injured explanation about the best butter being so dear, and Miss Nell had said they were to have the second best because they ate such a lot and were spending too much money. Nell sat quite calm and quiet; she made no attempt to stop Sarah. She had got beyond that. Ted meanwhile had helped himself to the rank butter, and was heroically eating it, his face stolid. Denis’s brow was thunderous; in a curt voice that set poor Sarah weeping in the kitchen he told her to go. Then there was an uncomfortable pause. Ted broke it with an anecdote. He told it, and Nell smiled politely. Sheila Pat sat and considered awhile, then she observed clearly, "I don’t see anythin’ to laugh at in that story at all!" Ted grew scarlet. "I—I believe I left out the point, acushlum!" "Please tell it me!" He did—laboriously, and with none of the dry humour that usually distinguished his stories. Nell looked at him, heroically retelling his poor little anecdote, and heroically eating his bread and rank butter, and she burst out laughing. "Oh, poor Ted, do give K.K. the rest of that crust!" "Should think it would poison her," said Denis, moodily. "I like it," declared Ted, with obstinate mendacity. "You’re all so particular!" And he ate it down to the very last crumb. After lunch Denis went off to the bank, and Ted went with him. "Nell," at the end of the afternoon Denis burst in, "I’m all bottled up! Let me explode! Wasn’t it a beastly lunch, old girl? I know we’ve got to be poor,—horribly, beastly poor,—but I can’t stand making a show like that before a guest—making him think he oughtn’t to be there at all—hang it all, to be stingy to one’s friends!" "You see," said Nell, in quite a weary old little voice, "poverty isn’t so picturesque out of books as in them." "Rice and rank butter—bricky bread! It’s all rot! We can stint more when we’re alone." "I didn’t know Ted was coming." "Good Heavens, are we to live like pigs, that we can’t ask anyone to lunch without an elaborate warning beforehand?" "You just said we could stint—" "I don’t care what I said! It was a ridiculous and needless fiasco! And you know it! Why are we living so much worse all of a sudden? When Aunt Kezia’s here we do have something decent to eat, though it _is_ plain." Nell sprang up. She flung her palette, her brush, down.