"Oh! Oh, Denis—get it out!"
"I will!" cried Ted, and gallantly hied to the rescue.
They shouted with joy at his wild plunges after the kipper, and when he at last held it proudly aloft, minus a tail, and scorched and shrivelled into a sprat, it was met with a torrent of rude remarks.
Ted handed Molly his own kipper with an air of offended pride; in vain she protested.
"Here—catch, old man!" Denis flung a fresh kipper to him. "The burnt one will do for your second help!"
And sure enough it did. Ted found kippers, cooked by himself and eaten for tea, so good that he ate up every blackened bit of the luckless burnt fish, and declared he regretted the lost tail.
He looked round on the scorched cheeks and smiled benignly. "Isn't it good?" he said, with the simplicity that made Nell so fond of him.
"Oh, Ted, what a dear old man you will make some day!"
"Cantankerous old beast, I think!" observed Denis.
"Isn't it funny that things one cooks one's self are always so much nicer than kitchen-cooked things?" reflected Molly. "But I wish I hadn't cooked my nose quite so much."