The wee bird in the doorway again made itself heard: ‘Give me back my music! Give me back my song!’ and so distressful was its pleading that she clutched the child’s shoulder and went at once to the dresser, and, almost before she knew it, she was standing at the door with the Pail in her hand.
‘Take your music and your song, you poor little dear,’ she said in her tenderest voice to the bird; ’and go along home to your mate, and make her as happy as you have made my heart this day.’
She turned the Pail over on its side as she spoke, and the lark flew into it; and in a minute or less it was out again and away into the semi-darkness, singing its own ecstatic song as it went!
Tom came up the road as it flew off; and as she waited there by the door for him to help her back to her chair, the little old woman’s rhyme came back to her, the last line of which floated through her brain:
‘To give her a treasure
From out of the blue.
When she shall know too
’Tis better to give than to keep my pednpaley!’
A year and four months went by, and Joan was quite helpless again—as helpless as when the babe was brought to her—and but for that babe, now to childhood grown, she did not know what she would have done. Her man was not so young as he was, and had a great deal more to do at the mine, and therefore less time to devote to woman’s work. But thanks to Ninnie-Dinnie’s careful training, his services in this respect were not required. The little maid now did all the work of the small cottage, and the cooking too—even to making the hoggans for Tom’s dinner. Besides which, she waited on her dear Mammie Trebisken hand and foot, and made the poor sufferer’s life as happy as possible under the circumstances. Tom wondered how she did it all, ’and such a dinky little soul too—not much bigger than a little pednpaley itself,’ he said.
Ninnie-Dinnie did not go out on the moor all this time, and nothing Joan could say would make her. But when July came, and the blackberry brambles were in flower, and the great moors began to look beautifully purple with the bloom of the heather, she cast wistful glances out of the window, and one bright morning she asked Tom to take her with him a little way.