"Yes she is. I'm so glad—I do hate to have books mauled about."
Sarah grinned delightedly.
"This is how she does, miss. She gits out 'er black-edged handkercher what she 'ad for father's funeral and Walter's and Gladys's,—what died, you know,—and she puts it across the back of the book and round the edges so as her fingers don't touch the pages at all, and she keeps the book wrapped up in that funeral handkercher, and she says to the children, 'If ever I ketch you a-touching of that handkercher, I'll beat you till you're black and blue from head to foot!' So you see, miss, that's 'ow it is."
Nell, twinkling over the contrast between Mrs. Jones's fierce words and herself, a meek little thin woman with watery blue eyes and no control over even her baby, gravely declared she did see, and then hurried up to the Stronghold again.
"It really looks charming!" she said, standing on the threshold and looking round the little, overcrowded room, with its pictures, its books, its various treasures, its photographs, a good many of them in beautifully carved Irish bog-oak frames, its two bronze jars with pink chrysanthemums in them, its collection of bog-oak pigs of all sizes.
Jim O'Driscoll sat thoughtfully in the large cage that Denis had made for him. He had discovered that, by stretching out his arm to its uttermost length, he could reach a cushion on the sofa; that, by wriggling in a finger, he could pull the feathers out, and he was very happy.
"Poor Jimmy," Nell said as she passed him sitting innocently gazing before him, "I wonder if you're getting used to earthquakes and tornadoes that seize up your house and hurl it into darkness behind the sofa! Aunt Kezia never used to come up here as she does now!"
Molly shouted out, "Oh!" and a crash drowned her voice.
In trying to fix some holly in a pot on a shelf, she had knocked the shelf down, and with it a collection of pots, curious stones, photographs, pigs.
Nell prognosticated, "Now Ted Lancaster will come," and dived under the table after a curious old fossil she had found one day in the little stream at the foot of Belmarknock Hill. She picked it up, and sat back on her heels, lost in a sudden dream of that misty day when she had found it. The dear mist! She remembered what a vivid emerald green the grass had been—and the golden shafts of sunlight that fell athwart the mist—and the deep blue sky behind it. She remembered how clearly the reflection of herself and her red tam-o'-shanter had shown in the stream—and down the hill Denis's voice, singing and shouting to his dogs, had come to her....