eat soaked his shirt; beads of sweat gathered on his grey
eyebrows, and dripped, sometimes on his hands, sometimes on the pile
of old plaster--greyish-white, and fine almost as wood-ash--into
which they dug and dug, tearing the thin lathes aside, pouncing on
each coin brought to the surface.

Once only--though the kneeling cost him torture, and the sweat came
no less from anguish than from exertion--did he pause and straighten
himself up to listen. Upstairs the Penhaligon children had awakened
with the daylight and were talking--chirruping like sparrows--before
they left their beds--

Hey! now the day dawis;
The joly cock crawis . . .

--but Nicky-Nan toiled on in his dim parlour, collecting wealth.

By eight o'clock he had picked up and arranged--still in neat piles
of twenty--some eight hundred coins of golden money. His belly was
fasting: but he had forgotten the crust in the cupboard. Had he not
here enough to defray a king's banquet?

Some one tapped on the door. Nicky-Nan, startled, raised himself
upright on his knees and called in a tremor--

"No admittance!"

As he staggered up and made for the door, to press his weight against
it, Mrs Penhaligon spoke on the other side.

"Mr Nanjivell!"

"Ma'am?"

"The postman, with a letter for you! I'll fetch it in, if you wish:
but the poor fellow 'd like a clack, I can see."

It jumped to his tongue to bid her fetch and pass it in to him under
the door. The outside of a letter would not tell her much, and
anyhow would excite less curiosity than his own corporal envelope,
begrimed as it was just now with dust and plaster and cobwebs.
But the end of her message alarmed him with misgivings more serious.
"Why should Lippity-Libby want a clack with him? . . . Just for
gossip's sake?--or to convey a warning?" Lippity-Libby knew, or
averred that he knew, the author of yesterday's anonymous
letter. . . .

"Tell him I'll be out in a moment!"

Nicky-Nan beat his hands together softly to rid them of the worst of
the plaster, then smoothed them briskly down his chest in a hasty
effort to remove the cobwebs that clung there. The result--two
damning smears on the front of his shirt--was discouraging.

He opened the door with great caution, peered out into the passage,
and found to his great relief that Mrs Penhaligon, that discreet
woman, had withdrawn to her own premises.

He would have reconnoitred farther, but in the porch at the end of
the passa