An hour later, with so much of daylight about him as the window permitted, he was still on his knees.  Already he had collected more than a hundred golden coins, putting them together in piles of twenty.

The dawn had been chilly:  but he was warm enough by this time.  Indeed, sweat soaked his shirt; beads of sweat gathered on his grey eyebrows, and dripped, sometimes on his hands, sometimes on the pile of old plaster—­greyish-white, and fine almost as wood-ash—­into which they dug and dug, tearing the thin lathes aside, pouncing on each coin brought to the surface.

Once only—­though the kneeling cost him torture, and the sweat came no less from anguish than from exertion—­did he pause and straighten himself up to listen.  Upstairs the Penhaligon children had awakened with the daylight and were talking—­chirruping like sparrows—­before they left their beds—­

     Hey! now the day dawis;
     The joly cock crawis . . .

—­but Nicky-Nan toiled on in his dim parlour, collecting wealth.

By eight o’clock he had picked up and arranged—­still in neat piles of twenty—­some eight hundred coins of golden money.  His belly was fasting:  but he had forgotten the crust in the cupboard.  Had he not here enough to defray a king’s banquet?

Some one tapped on the door.  Nicky-Nan, startled, raised himself upright on his knees and called in a tremor—­

“No admittance!”

As he staggered up and made for the door, to press his weight against it, Mrs Penhaligon spoke on the other side.

“Mr Nanjivell!”

“Ma’am?”

“The postman, with a letter for you!  I’ll fetch it in, if you wish:  but the poor fellow ’d like a clack, I can see.”

It jumped to his tongue to bid her fetch and pass it in to him under the door.  The outside of a letter would not tell her much, and anyhow would excite less curiosity than his own corporal envelope, begrimed as it was just now with dust and plaster and cobwebs.  But the end of her message alarmed him with misgivings more serious.  “Why should Lippity-Libby want a clack with him? . . .  Just for gossip’s sake?—­or to convey a warning?” Lippity-Libby knew, or averred that he knew, the author of yesterday’s anonymous letter. . . .

“Tell him I’ll be out in a moment!”

Nicky-Nan beat his hands together softly to rid them of the worst of the plaster, then smoothed them briskly down his chest in a hasty effort to remove the cobwebs that clung there.  The result—­two damning smears on the front of his shirt—­was discouraging.

He opened the door with great caution, peered out into the passage, and found to his great relief that Mrs Penhaligon, that discreet woman, had withdrawn to her own premises.

He would have reconnoitred farther, but in the porch at the end of the passage Lippity-Libby stood in plain view, with the street full of sunshine behind him.  So Nicky-Nan contented himself with closing the door carefully and hasping it.