"It is very hard for me to decide," the father complained gently enough, "unless I know what you do really wish."
"I want to stay like this forever—forever!" suddenly blurted out the girl, done with mild evasion, and repeating the last phrase so that she surely must be understood.
Herrick felt old. The interview had sapped his blood of its buoyancy.
"Ah, if we could, if we only could," he muttered. He could hardly trust himself to look at Nancy. She brought to his mind the defiant beauty of her mother; it was no use to-day trying to hold his mind back from rambling through roadways of the past. "No, Nancy, neither you nor I nor anyone can stay like this forever. I thought I could once. We grow up in spite of ourselves, child. The happy times are just a day, a short day at that, and then—finish."
The tension was eased by this last bit of prosiness.
"Well, we're not getting forward with our difficulty," Herrick was able to say in a more matter-of-fact voice. "I won't ask you any more questions because I don't think you know yourself what you wish. I have just one more thing I want you to do; I want you to bring me the most precious thing you have, the thing you like better than anything else, no matter what it is. That will help me."
Herrick waited curiously for his commission to be performed and teased himself imagining what the girl would bring. He would know in what direction her fancy ran more clearly than she could tell him. "Butcher, baker, candle-maker—" How could he stop this accursed rhyme from ringing in his head?
Nancy was gone a long time but at last she returned.
"What did you bring?" her father asked.
The girl held in her hand a flat object wrapped in silk. She took off the covering and to his surprise Herrick saw a little wooden tablet, carved and gilded, and so exquisitely done he could hardly believe Nancy's confession that she and Edward had made it.