-not so
long ago. So he fought her for the hairpin while she ducked her head
and threw it backwards, and laughed, and struggled in his grasp; to
submit, of course, at last, to yield up the hairpin, to roast it, red
hot in the fire, to watch it burn its malodorous passage through his
pipe.

That ceremony over, she got him his boots, and would have laced them
for him, and kissed them too, if he would have let her, and did grovel
at his feet to arrange the roll of his stockings for him.

"You _have_ got nice calves, Ted!" she told him. "I don't think I could
love even you if you had sticks of things like Robert Anstey's."

"Oh, Bob's legs'll do all right," Ted said, loyally. He stamped a foot
into the second boot, and in doing so ground some of the broken vase
beneath his heel. He filliped her cheek, then, smiling into her eyes--

"You and your old woman's superstitions!" he said. "Perhaps you don't
know I've a--what d'ye call it?--a portent in my own family--or had
when I had a family," he told her, bending again over his boot. "Well,
I have, then!"

"And what's a portent, silly? I daresay it's nothing to boast of."

"It's a little--white--DOG!"

He barked the last word at her, loud and sharp, his face suddenly
projected into hers. She fell backward and sat on her heels.

"Ted! How horrid of you! What does it do?"

"I haven't the faintest notion."

"Are you making it up?"

"Not I. They all made it up. My father, and my grandfather, and the
whole tribe. They stuck it into each other, and tried to stick it into
me, that whenever one of us is going to die he sees this beastly little
hound."

"Ted!" she was clinging to the calf she admired now, in an agreeable
ecstasy of shuddering. "I wish I had a ghost, too."

"You shall have mine, with pleasure."

"But why didn't you tell me before?"

"I clean forgot it till this minute. My father told me about it when I
was quite a little chap."

"But is it true, Ted?"

"Of course it isn't."

"And did they really see it?"

"They said they did. You may bet your life they didn't."

When he was ready to walk round the little domain he had inherited from
his father, Elinor accompanied him to the gate. "I wouldn't have a
little white dog for a ghost!" she said to him, slightingly, as they
parted. "Anyone could have as good a ghost as that if they tried!"

"Everyone couldn't have an ancestor who had tortured one to death to
spite his wife!" he said.

"You can see a