(Mother Carey stops her darning now and Kathleen makes no pretence of sewing; the story is fast approaching its climax,—­everybody feels that, including Peter, who hopes that he will be in it, in some guise or other, before it ends.)

“‘Art thou married, lady?’ the aged one asks courteously, ’and if not, wilt thou be mine?’”

“I tremble, because he does not seem to notice that he is eighty or ninety and I but fifteen, yet I fear if I reject him too scornfully and speedily the Yellow House will never be mine.  ’Grant me a little time in which to fit myself for this great honor,’ I say modestly, and a mighty good idea, too, that I got out of a book the other day; when suddenly, as I gaze upward, my suitor’s white hair turns to brown, his beard drops off, his wrinkles disappear, and he stands before me a young Knight, in full armor.  ‘Wilt go to the yellow castle with me, sweet lady?’ he asks. ‘Wilt I!’ I cry in ecstasy, and we leap on the back of a charger hitched to the Colonel’s horseblock.  We dash down the avenue of elms and maples that line the village street, and we are at our journey’s end before the Knight has had time to explain to me that he was changed into the guise of an old man by an evil sorcerer some years before, and could never return to his own person until some one appeared who wished to live in the yellow house, which is Beulah Castle.

“We approach the well-known spot and the little picket gate, and the Knight lifts me from the charger’s back.  ’Here are house and lands, and all are yours, sweet lady, if you have a younger brother.  There is treasure hidden in the ground behind the castle, and no one ever finds such things save younger brothers.’

“‘I have a younger brother,’ I cry, ‘and his name is Peter!’”

At this point in Nancy’s chronicle Peter is nearly beside himself with excitement.  He has been sitting on his hassock, his hands outspread upon his fat knees, his lips parted, his eyes shining.  Somewhere, sometime, in Nancy’s stories there is always a Peter.  He lives for that moment!

Nancy, stifling her laughter, goes on rapidly: 

“And so the Knight summons Younger Brother Peter to come, and he flies in a great air ship from Charlestown to Beulah.  And when he arrives the Knight asks him to dig for the buried treasure.”

(Peter here turns up his sleeves to his dimpled elbows and seizes an imaginary implement.)

“Peter goes to the back of the castle, and there is a beautiful garden filled with corn and beans and peas and lettuce and potatoes and beets and onions and turnips and carrots and parsnips and tomatoes and cabbages.  He takes his magic spade and it leads him to the cabbages.  He digs and digs, and in a moment the spade strikes metal!

“‘He has found the gold!’ cries the Knight, and Peter speedily lifts from the ground pots and pots of ducats and florins, and gulden and doubloons.”