"But I should have known," said Jane-Anne.
CHAPTER XII
FOUND!
"And if she can have access to a good library of old and classical books, there need be no choosing at all ... turn her loose into the old library every wet day, and let her alone ... let her loose in the library, I say, as you do a fawn in the field. It knows the bad weeds twenty times better than you; and the good ones, too, and will eat some bitter and prickly ones, good for it, which you had not the slightest thought would have been so." Sesame and Lilies.
Jane-Anne had got her heart's desire. She was allowed to wait upon Mr. Wycherly. She laid his breakfast and carried it in. She laid his luncheon and his dinner and her good aunt brought the heavy trays to the slab outside the dining-room door, and Jane-Anne fetched dishes one by one and set them on table or sideboard, and handed vegetables and poured out Mr. Wycherly's beer for him from the old brown Toby jug that had once belonged to Admiral Bethune.
It was brought about in this wise. When Jane-Anne had been in Holywell about a month there came a letter for her one morning.
Now, that she should have a letter at all, except from her aunt, was a tremendous and most untoward event. Yet it was undoubtedly for her, for it was addressed Miss Jane-Anne (no surname), c/o M. Wycherly, Esq., not enclosed in one of his, but stamped and sent to her direct. She found it on her plate at breakfast when she came down, and turned it over and over in her hands before she opened it.
The handwriting was small, clear and upright, and rather like Mr. Wycherly's own. She noticed this at once as she had often taken his letters to post for him.
"Aren't you going to open your letter?" her aunt asked.
Nervously Jane-Anne tore the envelope, flushed and paled, as she always did when excited, and then read it eagerly in absolute silence.