“You have had a nice long sleep,” she said in a cheerful voice. “Now will you come to the table and have some tea? Here is a fresh egg for you, which Brownie, my dear speckled hen, laid while you were asleep. You feel much better, don’t you? Now you must make a very good tea, and when you have finished Nancy will take you as far as Rufus’ Stone, where I have asked a man with a chaise to meet her; he will drive you back to Avonsyde in less than an hour.”
Phil felt quite satisfied with these arrangements. He also discovered that he was very hungry; so he tumbled off the sofa, and with his light-brown hair very much tossed and his eyes shining, took his place at the tea-table. There he began to chatter, and did not at all know that the lady was leading him on to tell her as much as possible about Rachel and Kitty and about his life at Avonsyde. He answered all her questions eagerly, for he had by no means got over his impression that she was really the lady whom he had come to seek.
“I don’t want Avonsyde, you know,” he said suddenly, speaking with great earnestness. “Oh, please, if you are the lady of the forest and can give those who seek you a gift, let my gift be a bag of gold! I will take it back to mother in the chaise to-night, and then—and then—poor mother! My mother is very poor, lady, but when I give her your gold she will be rich, and then we can both go away from Avonsyde.”
For a moment or two the lady with the sad gray eyes looked with wonder and perplexity at little Phil—some alarm even was depicted on her face, but it suddenly cleared and lightened. She rose from her chair, and going up to the child stooped and kissed him.
“You don’t want Avonsyde. Then I am your friend, little Phil Lovel. Here are three kisses—one for you, one for Rachel, one for Kitty. Give my kisses as from yourself to the little girls. But I am not what you think me, Phil. I am no supernatural lady who can give gifts or can dazzle with unusual beauty. I am just a plain woman who lives here most of the year and earns her bread with hard and daily labor. I cannot give money, for I have not got it. I can be your friend, however. Not a powerful friend—certainly not; but no true friendship is to be lightly thrown away. Why, my little man, how disappointed you look! Are you really going to cry?”
“Oh, no, I won’t cry!” said Phil, but with a very suspicious break in his voice; “but I am so tired of all the secrets and of pretending to be strong and all that. If you are not the lady and have not got the bag of gold, mother and I will have to stay on at Avonsyde, for mother is very poor and she would starve if we went away. You don’t know what a dreadful weight it is on one’s mind always to be keeping secrets.”
“I am very sorry, Phil. As it happens I do know what a secret means. I am very sorry for you, more particularly as I am just going to add to your secrets. I want you to promise not to tell any one at Avonsyde about my little house in the forest nor about me. I think you will keep my secret when I tell you that if it is known it will do me very grave injury.”
“I would not injure you,” said Phil, raising his sweet eyes to her face. “I do hate secrets and I find them dreadfully hard to keep, but one more won’t greatly matter, only I do wish you were the real lady of the forest.”
When Nancy came back to the little cottage after disposing of Phil comfortably in the chaise and giving the driver a great many emphatic directions about him, she went straight into her lady’s presence. She was a privileged old servant, and she did not dream of knocking at the door of the little sitting-room; no, she opened it boldly and came in, many words crowding to her lips.
“This will upset her fine,” she muttered under her breath. “Oh, dear! oh, dear! I’ll have to do a lot of talking to-night. I’m not one to say she gives way often, but when she do, why, she do, and that’s the long and short of it.”