"Yes, quite ready, now Lallie has brought the milk. Good morning, Mrs.
Popham; the children want me for some new enterprise."
"You give yourself most too much to 'em," expostulated Mrs. Popham; "you
don't take no vacations."
"Ah, well, you see 'myself' is all I have to give them," answered Mrs.
Carey, taking Peter and going to meet Nancy.
"Mother," said that young person breathlessly, "I must tell you what I
didn't tell at the time, for fear of troubling you. I wrote to Mr.
Hamilton by the same post that Mr. Harmon did. Bill is so busy and such
a poor writer I thought he wouldn't put the matter nicely at all, and I
didn't want you, with all your worries, brought into it, so I wrote to
the Consul myself, and kept a copy to show you exactly what I said. I
have been waiting at the gate for the letters every day for a week, but
this morning Gilbert happened to be there and shouted, 'A letter from
Germany for you, Nancy!' So all of them are wild with curiosity; Olive
and Cyril too, but I wanted you to open and read it first because it may
be full of awful blows."
Mrs. Carey sat down on the side of a green bank between the Pophams'
corner and the Yellow House and opened the letter,--with some
misgivings, it must be confessed. Nancy sat close beside her and held
one edge of the wide sheets, closely filled.
"Why, he has written you a volume, Nancy!" exclaimed Mrs. Carey. "It
must be the complete story of his life! How long was yours to him?" "I
don't remember; pretty long; because there seemed to be so much to tell,
to show him how we loved the house, and why we couldn't spend Cousin
Ann's money and move out in a year or two, and a lot about ourselves, to
let him see we were nice and agreeable and respectable.
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