Nancy spoke half-aloud, and came yet nearer and bent very low indeed over the sleeper.
“She do feature Master Phil and she has got the dress of a fine lady. Oh, no doubt she’s his poor, weak bit of a mother! Bless the boy! No wonder he’s ailing if she has the mothering of him.”
Nancy’s words were all muttered half-aloud, and under ordinary occasions such sounds would undoubtedly have awakened Mrs. Lovel; now they only caused her to move restlessly and to murmur some return words in her sleep.
“Phil, if we cannot find that tankard we are undone.” Then after a pause: “It is a long way to the bog. I wonder if Phil has left the tankard on the borders of the bog.”
On hearing these sentences, which were uttered with great distinctness and in accents almost bordering on despair, Nancy suddenly threw her basket to the ground; then she clasped her two hands over her head and, stepping back a pace or two, began to execute a hornpipe, to the intense astonishment of some on-lookers in the shape of birds and squirrels.
“Ah, my lady fair!” she exclaimed, “what you have let out now makes assurance doubly sure. And so you think you’ll find the precious tankard in the bog! Now, now, what shall I do? How can I prevent your going any further on such a fool’s quest? Ah, my pretty little ladies, my pretty Miss Rachel and Miss Kitty, I believe I did you a good turn when I hid that tankard away.”
Nancy indulged in a few more expressions of self-congratulation then, a sudden idea coming to her, she fumbled in her pocket for a bit of paper, and scribbling something on it laid it on the sleeping lady’s lap.
When Mrs. Lovel awoke, somewhere close on midday, she took up the little piece of paper and read its contents with startled eyes:
“Come what may come, tyde what may tyde,
Lovel shall dwell at Avonsyde.“False heirs never yet have thriven;
Tankards to the right are given.”
The last two lines, which Nancy had composed in a perfect frenzy of excitement and rapture at what she considered a sudden development of the poetic fancy, caused poor Mrs. Lovel’s cheeks to blanch and her eyes to grow dim with a sudden overpowering sense of fear. She rose to her feet and pursued her way home, trembling in every limb.