they are, in this bag; we'll have 'em after tea, what?"

"But," she said again after a pause, still looking at the grate, "they
had their priests and priestesses, and followers and people, hadn't they?
It was their things I was looking at--combs and brooches and hairpins,
and things to cut their nails with. They're all in a glass case there.
And they had safety-pins, exactly like ours."

"Oh, they were a civilised people," said Ed cheerfully. "It all gives you
an idea. I only hope you didn't tire yourself out. You'll soon be all
right, of course, but you have to be careful yet. We'll have a clean
tablecloth, shall we?"

She had been seriously ill; her life had been despaired of; and somehow
the young Polytechnic student seemed anxious to assure her that she was
now all right again, or soon would be. They were to be married "as soon
as things brightened up a bit," and he was very much in love with her. He
watched her head and neck as he continued to lay the table, and then, as
he crossed once more to the cupboard, he put his hand lightly in passing
on her hair.

She gave so quick a start that he too started. She must have been very
deep in her reverie to have been so taken by surprise.

"I say, Bessie, don't jump like that!" he cried with involuntary
quickness. Indeed, had his hand been red-hot, or ice-cold, or taloned,
she could not have turned a more startled, even frightened, face to him.

"It was your touching me," she muttered, resuming her gazing into the
grate.

He stood looking anxiously down on her. It would have been better not to
discuss her state, and he knew it; but in his anxiety he forgot it.

"That jumpiness is the effect of your illness, you know. I shall be glad
when it's all over. It's made you so odd."

She was not pleased that he should speak of her "oddness." For that
matter, she, too, found him "odd"--at any rate, found it difficult to
realise that he was as he always had been. He had begun to irritate her a
little. His club-footed reading of the verses had irritated her, and she
had tried hard to hide from him that his cocksure opinions and the tone
in which they were pronounced jarred on her. It was not that she was
"better" than he, "knew" any more than he did, didn't (she supposed) love
him still the same; these moods, that dated from her illness, had nothing
to do with those things; she reproached herself sometimes that she was
subject to such doldrums.

"It's all right, Ed, but ple