Her eye caught the darkening look of the Pail as she was putting on her sunbonnet, and she thought the look meant she must take it with her, and she did.
‘What shall I bring you home?’ she asked, looking over her shoulder at Joan as she and Tom were going out of the door; and the invalid, catching sight of a sunbeamed pool lying high on the heath, said, with a laugh:
‘You shall bring me home a pailful of sunbeams from the pool I can see from my chair.’
‘A pack of nonsense!’ cried Tom. ‘As well ask for the moon. I should have thought that our Ninnie-Dinnie,’ resting his huge hand on the child’s head, ‘was all the sunbeam you wanted now.’
‘So she is, Tom, when you ent here,’ cried the woman, smiling tenderly at both her dears.
‘All the same,’ said Ninnie-Dinnie, ‘I will bring you home a pailful of sunbeams if I can.’
When she and Tom reached the pool, they stopped and looked in, or tried to, for they could not see its bottom for sunbeams, which rippled all over its surface in tiny waves of light.
‘Now is your chance to get that pailful of sunbeams thy foolish old Mammie Trebisken axed ’ee to get,’ said the miner.
‘It is,’ said Ninnie-Dinnie in her grave old woman’s manner; and, leaning over the pool, she held the Pail over the side and cried: ‘Little brown pool, give me thy sunbeams! Little brown pool, give me thy light!’ and, to Tom’s amazement (he ought not to have been astonished at anything by this time), he saw the light leave the pool and flow into the Pail!
When the moor-pool had given all its sunbeams, and the water was a darker brown than a sparrow’s back, Ninnie-Dinnie stood up and looked into her Pail, and Tom looked too, and saw nothing.