“I’m glad you found it,” she added placidly; “you haven’t one dish that is quite whole, and I have a blue one, and a white one, and a jug.”
Edwitha touched the bowl caressingly with the tips of her fingers. “I will try to find another for you,” she said.
“If you find any more,” answered Audrey, pushing Pincher away from the dish of cold meat, “you can have them. I’d rather have our dishes in sets, I think.”
Edwitha was poking about in the bank where she had found the bowl, late that afternoon, when Wilfrid came up the bank. There seemed to be no more dishes in sight.
“What have you found?” asked Wilfrid. He held it up in the sunlight, and drew a quick breath of delight. [“How beautiful it is!” he exclaimed] in a low voice.
Edwitha was silent. She was filled with a great happiness because she had the bowl.
“I wonder how it came to be here,” mused Wilfrid, and fell to digging and prodding the earth.
“There isn’t another in the hole,” said Edwitha. “I’ve been here a long time.”
“This is the only bit I ever saw that was found just here. But see here, Edwitha, this is clay. It is exactly like the clay they use at the pottery down by the ford, but finer—I think. I tell you—I believe there was a pottery here once.”
He and Edwitha took the bowl and a few lumps of the clay, next morning, to the Master Potter beyond the village. Wilfrid had served his apprenticeship at this pottery and was now a journeyman. The clay proved to be finer and more workable than that near the pottery, and the deposit was close to the high road, so that donkeys and pack-horses could come up easily to be loaded with their earthen pots. It was even possible, so the Master Potter said, that it would make a better grade of ware than they had been able to make hitherto. Finally, and most important from the point of view of Wilfrid and Edwitha, it was on Wilfrid’s own farm, he had his old mother to support, and this discovery might make it possible for him to have his own pottery and be a Master Potter.