“Poor little Phil! He has a wonderfully sweet face.”
“He has the bravest nature I ever met. My boy and girls would almost die for Phil. The fact is, all this is most complicated and difficult, and much of the mischief would have been avoided if only that wretched sister-in-law of mine had been above-board.”
“Yes,” answered Mrs. Lovel; “but even her stealing a march on you does not give you back the tankard nor the letter.”
“True; and I don’t suppose even she could have stolen them. Well, Rachel, we must all hope for the best.”
“If there is a thing that worries me,” said Nancy White to herself—“if there is a thing that keeps coming and coming into my dreams and getting that fantastic and that queer in shape—one time being big enough to hold quarts and quarts of water, and another time so small that you’d think it would melt before your very eyes—it’s this wretched silver can. It’s in my mind all day long and it’s in my dreams all night long. There! I wonder if the bit of a thing is bright enough now.”
As Nancy spoke to herself she rubbed and polished and turned round and round and tenderly dusted the lost tankard of the house of Lovel until it really shone like a mirror.
“It takes a deal of trouble, and I’m sure it isn’t worth it,” she said to herself. “I just kept it more out of a bit of mischief than anything else in the beginning; but it just seems to me now as if I hated it, and yet I couldn’t part with it. I believe it’s a bit of a haunted thing, or it wouldn’t come into my dreams after this fashion.”
Nancy kept the tankard up in her bedroom. After giving it a last fond rub and looking at it queerly with an expression half of admiration, half of fear, she locked it up in a little cupboard in the wall and tripped downstairs to attend to her mistress’ comforts.
Mrs. Lovel kept no secrets from her old servant, and Nancy knew about her mistress’ adventures in London and her unexpected meeting with the friend of her early days, Rupert Lovel. Still, Nancy had a shrewd suspicion that not quite all was told her; she had a kind of idea that there was something in the background.