Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/414

 parcel lying on the chimney-piece. I have been dying all this afternoon to open it. Wasn't I honourable not to do it?"

Mary had just returned from some parish visiting, and Cilla, who considered herself to have a cold, was lounging in the armchair with a novel which Mrs. Halroyd had lent her governess to read on the journey home.

"Oh! let us open it by all means," Mary said, "only I will light the candle first, and draw the curtains, my dear; you must be killing your eyes reading by fire-light!"

As she trimmed the fire, and proceeded to close the shutters and light the candle, Cilla seized the parcel and attacked the string. Of course she could not break it, and she began a raid on Mary's workbasket, but her sister stopped her. Not even to gratify Cilla's curiosity would Mary allow her best pair of scissors to be spoilt by cutting string.

"Particular old thing!" Cilla called her, with a little impatient shrug.

"But my dear, my best scissors! my only useable pair! If you'll wait one minute till I light the candle, I'll fetch a knife from the kitchen."

Cilla turned it in her mind whether to go herself, but gave up the idea with a shiver, and applied herself to unfastening the knots.

"What do you suppose it can be, Mary? A fairy godmother's gift perhaps—eh?"

"A wishing-cap," said Mary, laughing. "Oh! dear, what a useful possession that would be, Cilla. It shouldn't be a case of black puddings with us."

"Nice rooms and pretty things, and a pony carriage that I could drive myself," said Cilla, with a sigh through all her jesting speech.

"A living for papa, and a commission for Harry, and Harrow or Rugby for the boys!"

"And what for yourself? For your very own self?"

"Quite myself, and nobody else mixed up with it? Really, I don't know. I am very lucky, I think I have everything. Oh! I suppose I should give up governessing, if I were quite sure my dear old Archie would get somebody for his governess who wouldn't be cross to him over those sums of his."

"And to go to the Nettlehurst ball? Come, Polly, I've heard you wish for that."

"Ah! to be sure! I forgot: and to be quite convinced that my polite unknown did not catch cold. There, Cilla," as she finished putting the room into its usual evening trim, "your patience shall be rewarded! I am going to fetch a knife."

"No, you need not: I have undone this knot now: the first I ever undid in my life, I think. Now, Polly!"

Mary came and knelt by her as she broke the seals, and unwound the packthread. Out fell a tightly folded roll of thin white paper.

Cilla gave a little half-laughing cry of disappointment: but Mary knew better the look of the article, and she pounced on it with an exclamation of astonishment.

"Bank-notes! how strange! Where can they possibly come from? One, two, three, ten notes! Oh, Cilla, how wonderful!"

"What are they? Five-pound notes? Ten-pound notes?"

"Thousand pound notes! Ten of them, Cilla!" and the brown eyes looked as if they never would close again.

"A wishing-cap indeed!" cried Cilla.

Mary carried off the bank-notes to the dingy little second sitting-room, where her father was generally to be found at this hour: for under such tremendous circumstances, Saturday though it was, she ventured to interrupt his sermon.

Mr. Mackworth was as surprised as his daughter, but less bewildered, and considerably less excited.

"Has it not struck you, my dear, that this money may belong to the gentleman who was so polite to you? Don't you think it probable that he may have left it in the cab, and that you may have taken it out with your other parcels?"

"But, papa, would any one carry about ten thousand pounds in this way? And then forget it? It doesn't seem credible."

"It is the only explanation I can see, however. And I think we must try to draw up an advertisement for the Times, which the owner would understand and nobody else. And now give me these things, and let me finish my sermon in peace."

Mary obeyed; but her father called her back to caution her against talking on the subject before the children or the servant.

"It is just as well," he said, "that all the world should not know that we have ten thousand pounds locked up in my table drawer." So nothing was said about it during tea; but when the boys were gone to bed, little else was talked about, and everybody had some solution of the mystery to offer, in which nobody else could see any probability.

"We shall be like some of Miss Edgeworth's goody poor people," said Cilla; "we shall send back the bank-notes, and be re-