CHAPTER V.
A REVELATION.
The dinner-table was spacious, consequently the absence of one was conspicuous. Mr. Verrall’s chair was still left for him: he would come yet, George said. No clergyman was present, and Thomas Godolphin said grace. He sat at the foot of the table, opposite to his brother.
“We are thirteen!” exclaimed Sir John Pevans, a young baronet, who had been reared a milksop, and feared consumption for himself. “I don’t much like it. It is the ominous number, you know.”
Some of them laughed. “What is that peculiar superstition?” asked Colonel Max. “I have never been able to understand it.”
“The superstition, is that if thirteen sit down to dinner, one of them is sure to die before the year is out,” replied young Pevans, speaking with great seriousness.
“Why is thirteen not as good a number to sit down as any other?” cried Colonel Max, humouring the baronet. “As good as fourteen, for instance?”
“It’s the odd number, I suppose.”
“The odd number. It’s no more the odd number, Pevans, than any other number’s odd. What do you say to eleven?—what do you say to fifteen?”
“I can’t explain it,” returned Sir John. “I only know that the superstition exists, and that I have noticed, in more instances than one, that it has been borne out. Three or four parties who have sat down thirteen to dinner, have lost one of them before the year has come round. You laugh at me, of course; I have been laughed at before: but suppose you notice it now? We are thirteen of us: see if we are all alive by the end of the year.”
Thomas Godolphin, in his inmost heart, thought it not unlikely that one of them, at any rate, would not be there. Several faces were broad with amusement: the most serious of them was Lord Averil’s.