“Miss Hamblyn wants you to step over to the depot as spry as you can, for she’s got some news she wants to tell you—good news, she calls it; but to me she looks as if she’d had a smartish blow of some sort.”
“Gracious me, Sam Peters! Why couldn’t you have come before I’d got my hands messing into this bread? Or else why couldn’t you have stopped until I was through with it, and had set it to rise?” exclaimed Mrs. Nichols, in great exasperation; for she, being a true daughter of Eve, was intensely anxious to know what Nell’s news was.
“Well, ma’am, not being blessed with what folks call second sight, I don’t see how I could be supposed to know when you were going to be busy with a batch of bread. But you’d better come along as quick as you can, for Miss Hamblyn was as white as a sheet when she spoke to me, and she went off back to her office with her lips a-quiver like a child that’s just in for a good cry; and I ought to know, seeing that I have got seven of them.” Having delivered himself of this statement, Sam Peters walked away with his head in the air, leaving Mrs. Nichols in a condition bordering on distraction.
“Did any one ever see such a man? And whatever can Nell have heard that she should call good news, and yet want to cry over? I hope that old man Doss Umpey hasn’t been finding out where she is, and trying to get her to go back and live with him. Or perhaps she has heard of a situation a hundred miles away, and feels bad at going so far from Bratley.”
Mrs. Nichols’s bread had but scanty consideration that morning. It was certainly poked, prodded, thumped, kneaded, and all the rest of it; but everything was done in such an absent-minded fashion that it was not wonderful, it was a trifle sad and lumpy, turning out vastly inferior to the usual excellence of her productions in that line.
As soon as it could be left to rise at its leisure before the fire, Mrs. Nichols flung her big grey shawl round her, slipped a pair of rubbers over her worn house-shoes, and set off for the depot.
But when she arrived, very much out of breath, and panting from the haste she had made, Nell was busy at the sounder, and held up her hand in token that she must not be interrupted.
For a whole twenty minutes after that, Mrs. Nichols sat wheezing and puffing on the chair in the corner, while Nell listened to communications being ticked out from Lytton, and sent back replies to questions which were being asked.
At last, just when the stout woman’s patience was exhausted, and she was on the point of getting up and going back to her bread, the irritating clicking of the sounder ceased, and she had the satisfaction of seeing Nell turn round ready to talk and be talked to.
“I meant you should know first; that was why I sent for you, for I should have had hard work to keep a secret like this the whole day through. I have been offered the post at Camp’s Gulch, and so I shall be only fifteen miles away.”