When I came back the fern-papers were still outside, and Charlie was looking flushed and cross.

“I don’t know how you managed,” he said, “but I can’t get them in.  This drawer must be shorter than the other; it doesn’t go nearly so far back.”

“Oh yes, it does, Charlie!” I insisted, for I felt as certain as people always do feel about little details of that kind.  “The drawers are exactly alike; you can’t have got the fern-sheets quite flush with each other,” and I began to arrange the trayful of things I had brought up-stairs in the bottom of the cupboard.

“I know it’s the drawer,” I heard Charlie say. ("He’s as obstinate as possible,” thought I.)

Then I heard him banging at the wood with his fists and his crutch. ("He is in a temper!” was my mental comment.) After this my attention was distracted for a second or two by seeing what I thought was a bit of toffy left in the tin, and biting it and finding it was a piece of sheet-glue.  I had not spit out all the disgust of it, when Charlie called me in low, awe-struck tones:  “Jack! come here.  Quick!”

I ran to him.  The drawer was open, but it seemed to have another drawer inside it, a long, narrow, shallow one.

“I hit the back, and this sprang out,” said Charlie.  “It’s a secret drawer—­and look!”

I did look.  The secret drawer was closely packed with rolls of thin leaflets, which we were old enough to recognize as bank-notes, and with little bags of wash-leather; and when Charlie opened the little bags they were filled with gold.

There was a paper with the money, written by the old miser, to say that it was a codicil to his will, and that the money was all for Mrs. Wood.  Why he had not left it to her in the will itself seemed very puzzling, but his lawyer (whom the Woods consulted about it) said that he always did things in a very eccentric way, but generally for some sort of reason, even if it were rather a freaky one, and that perhaps he thought that the relations would be less spiteful at first if they did not know about the money, and that Mrs. Wood would soon find it, if she used and valued his old press.

I don’t quite know whether there was any fuss with the relations about this part of the bequest, but I suppose the lawyer managed it all right, for the Woods got the money and gave up the school.  But they kept the old house, and bought some more land, and Walnut-tree Academy became Walnut-tree Farm once more.  And Cripple Charlie lived on with them, and he was so happy, it really seemed as if my dear mother was right when she said to my father, “I am so pleased, my dear, for that poor boy’s sake, I can hardly help crying.  He’s got two homes and two fathers and mothers, where many a young man has none, as if to make good his affliction to him.”

It puzzles me, even now, to think how my father could have sent Jem and me to Crayshaw’s school. (Nobody ever called him Mr. Crayshaw except the parents of pupils who lived at a distance.  In the neighbourhood he and his whole establishment were lumped under the one word Crayshaw’s, and as a farmer hard by once said to me, “Crayshaw’s is universally disrespected.”)