’Whoever my money’s left to, Jane, will be bound not to part with my china, nor my old chairs and presses.  Don’t you forget, my child.  It’s all written in black and white, and if the person my money’s left to sells these old things, my money goes along too.’

There was no letter on Monday morning, and I was up to my elbows in the suds, doing aunt’s bit of washing for her, when I heard a step on the brick path, and there was that old gentleman coming round by the water-butt to the back-door.

‘Well?’ says he.  ’Anything fresh happened?

‘For any sake,’ says I in a whisper, ’get out of this.  She’ll hear if I say more than two words to you.  If you’ve thought of anything that’s to be of any use, get along to the church porch, and I’ll be with you as soon as I can get these things through the rinse-water and out on the line.’

‘But,’ he says in a whisper, ’just let me into the parlour for five minutes, to have a look round and see what the rest of the bowl is like.’

Then I thought of all the stories I had heard of pedlars’ packs, and a married lady taken unexpectedly, and tricks like that to get into the house when no one was about.  So I thought—­

‘Well, if you are to go in, I must go in with you,’ and I squeezed my hands out of the suds, and rolled them into my apron and went in, and him after me.

You never see a man go on as he did.  It’s my belief he was hours in that room, going round and round like a squirrel in a cage, picking up first one bit of trumpery and then another, with two fingers and a thumb, as carefully as if it had been a tulle bonnet just home from the draper’s, and setting everything down on the very exact spot he took them up from.

More than once I thought that I had entertained a loony unawares, when I saw him turn up the cups and plates and look twice as long at the bottoms of them as he had at the pretty parts that were meant to show, and all the time he kept saying—­’Unique, by Gad, perfectly unique!’ or ‘Bristol, as I’m a sinner,’ and when he came to the large blue dish that stands at the back of the bureau, I thought he would have gone down on his knees to it and worshipped it.

‘Square-marked Worcester!’ he said to himself in a whisper, speaking very slowly, as if the words were pleasant in his mouth, ‘Square-marked Worcester—­an eighteen-inch dish!’

I had as much trouble getting him out of that parlour as you would have getting a cow out of a clover-patch, and every minute I was afraid aunt would hear him, or hear the china rattle or something; but he never rattled a bit, bless you, but was as quiet as a mouse, and as for carefulness he was like a woman with her first baby.  I didn’t dare ask him anything for fear he should answer too loud, and by-and-by he went up to the church porch and waited for me.