pings of cotton wool, great perfect
blooms of pink carnations lay. The spicy fragrance rose in our faces;
in the light of the lamp the glowing flowers smiled in their faultless
beauty.

"Poor Dapple's lucky flowers!" the boy said.

* * * * *

Those among us who know more of her dead lover than was ever told to
Daphne are disposed to call them her lucky flowers still.

A LITTLE WHITE DOG

"There!" Elinor cried. "Now, how could you be so careless, Ted?"

"The blessed thing must have jumped of its own accord off the
chimney-piece," Ted said. He looked down at his wife on her knees
beside him, ruefully collecting the fragments of the broken vase. "I
wasn't so much as looking at it, Nell."

"No! If you'd only had the sense to look at it!" Nell sighed. "But you
_will_ stand with your heels on the fender, and you push those great
shoulders of yours against the chimney-board, and smash go all my
ornaments--and a lot you care! However, something had to break to-day,
and it might have been worse."

"How do you mean 'had to'?"

"That great awkward Emily threw down a soup-plate last night; and
I----"

"No, not you, surely, Nell?"

"It wasn't my fault, of course. I was lifting the hand-glass from my
dressing-table as carefully as carefully, and it just dropped out of my
hands! 'That is the second,' I said to myself; 'now I wonder what the
third will be.'"

"And why did you say anything so silly?"

"Have you actually grown to your enormous age, and not known that when
one thing is broken in a house three are broken? Well, you have had an
ineffectual sort of education!"

"You don't believe such rotten rubbish?"

"Don't you? When I tell you of the soup-plate, the hand-mirror, and now
this vase? You can't call it nonsense, because there it is. A proof
before your very eyes. You might as well say it isn't unlucky to see a
single crow----"

"I'd sooner see one of the mischievous brutes any day than fifty."

"--That you may expect things to go pleasantly on the day you put on
your petticoat the wrong side out----"

"I should expect them to take a comic turn on the day I did that,
certainly!"

"What a ribald boy! Now, listen, Ted; be very attentive, and I will
tell you a true, true story. You mustn't laugh the tiniest titter--ah,
now, Ted! you won't laugh, will you?"

They were very young married people, and were not yet disposed to sit
quietly apart and talk to ea