Page:Hardings luck - nesbit.djvu/189

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BURIED TREASURE
147

And now he had indeed a full life: headwork, bodily exercises, work, home life, and joyous hours of play with two children who understood play as the poor little, dirty Deptford children do not and cannot understand it.

He lived and learned, and felt more and more that this was the life to which he really be longed. And days and weeks and months went by and nothing happened, and that is the happiest thing than can happen to any one who is already happy.

Then one night the nurse said—

"I have asked. You are to bury your treasure under the window of the solar parlour, and lie down and sleep on it. You'll take no harm, and when you're asleep I will say the right words, and you'll wake under the same skies and not under a built house, like as you feared."

She wrapped him in a warm cloth mantle of her own, when she took him from his bed that night after all the family were asleep, and put on his shoes and led him to the hole she had secretly dug in below the window. They had put his embroidered leather bag of gold in a little wrought-iron coffer that Sebastian had given him, and the nurse had tightly fastened the join of lid and box with wax and resin. The box was wrapped in a silk scarf, and the whole packet put into a big earthenware jar with a lid, and the join of lid and jar was smeared with resin and covered with clay. The nurse had shown him how to do all this.