Page:Two Magics.djvu/275

Rh the best I've seen yet, and I wish I could have you packed—put up in paper and bran—as I shall have my old pot there." She whisked about, remembering, recovering, eager: "Don't let me forget my precious pot!" Excited, with quick transitions, she quite sociably appealed to her companion, who shuffled sympathetically to where, out of harm, the object had been placed on a table. "Don't you just love old crockery? That's awfully sweet old Chelsea."

He took up the piece with tenderness, though, in his general agitation, not perhaps with all the caution with which, for daily service, he handled ancient frailties. He at any rate turned on this fresh subject an interested, puzzled eye. "Where is it I've known this very bit—though not to say, as you do, by name?" Suddenly it came to him. "In the pew-opener's front parlour!"

"No," his interlocutress cried, "in the pew-opener's best bedroom: on the old chest of drawers, you know—with those ducks of brass handles. I've got the handles too—I mean the whole thing; and the brass fender and fire-irons, and the chair her grandmother died in. Not in the fly," she added—"it was such a bore that they have to be sent."