Dick checked himself, and I suspect he blushed. Nell, with all her kindness of heart, couldn’t help laughing, for Dick was as harum-scarum as a hurricane.
I felt low-spirited from that moment, and knew I shouldn’t breathe freely till the precious ring was fairly out of the house.
In the evening Dick came down into the basement kitchen again to crack some butternuts. He knelt by the brick hearth and began to pound. I could have told him better than that. There was a crack in a corner of the fireplace, and all of a sudden off slipped that ring and rolled into it. Of course!
You could have knocked me over with a feather. But, as true as I stand here, that boy went whistling upstairs, and never missed the ring till Nell asked what he had done with it.
You may depend there were a few remarks made then. Dick rushed upstairs and down, and the whole family went to hunting. Next morning a carpenter was sent for to take up the boards under the dining-room table. There was a hole in the carpet there, and Dick was almost sure he must have dropped the ring when he stooped to pick up his knife.
How I longed to be heard! I talked then as plainly as I do now, but they thought it was the wind “sighing down chimney.”
Nell suggested that the ring might be around the fireplace.
“You’re warm, my dear,” whispered I, as they say in games when you come near a right guess.
But, alas, they didn’t look deep enough; there was a crack in the mortar under the bricks, and there lies that ring now, at the north-east corner, eight inches from the surface; there it lies to this day!