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."
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?"
"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."
"I clean forgot it till this minute. My father told me about it when I was quite a little chap."
"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 dozen little white dogs any day," she taunted him.
"I saw one more than I wanted yesterday when I was out with my gun," he admitted. "That new little beast of Anstey's ran in front of me into every field and frightened the birds. I hardly had a shot."
"Tell Bob to keep it at home," advised Nell.
In the course of the morning Bob Anstey, who always appeared some time during each day, came in. Elinor found him standing up by the chimney-piece, manipulating the silver calendar.