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Updated: May 26, 2025
He suggested that his own kit being ready they should stroll down together for a look. Nicky-Nan did not dare to refuse. The young Custom-house Officer, as he caught sight of Penhaligon approaching in uniform, slipped down from the parapet of the bridge, and sorted out his summons from the pile of blue papers in his hand. "That's all right, my billy," Penhaligon assured him.
At Troy and at St Martin's they will tell you that every Polpier man carries about his home-address on his person, and will rudely indicate where. Mrs Penhaligon put it one day in more delicate proverbial form. While Nicky-Nan who, as we have said, had a fondness for children stood and eyed the weather with approval, Mrs Penhaligon came bustling out, with her bonnet on.
"If it should turn out to be a case o' suppressed measles, now, I'd hate to go to my grave wi' the thought that I'd banged 'em in." So Mrs Penhaligon, having picked up her clothes, issued forth into the sunlight of the back-yard. 'Biades watched her through the narrow kitchen window. He watched her cunningly.
Well, he would have it attended to, sometime; his life was valuable now. But he wasn't going to hurry about it, if a sound leg meant his being taken and ordered off to this dam-fool War. Nicky-Nan pursed up his lips as he worked, whistling to himself a cheerful, tuneless ditty. Some one tapped on the door. "Who's there?" "It's me," answered the voice of Mrs Penhaligon. "Can I come in?"
For at this moment the three Penhaligon children broke in at the porch, burst past Mrs Climoe, and clung to their mother, clamouring for dinner. In the hubbub Nicky-Nan meanly slipped back to his den, closed the door, and dragged two chairs against it. Then he took a worn tea-tray and propped it against the window, blocking the broken panes.
"You never did!" said the voice of 'Bert. "Leave me to tell her," said the voice of 'Beida. "The way you're goin', she'll have the palpitations afore you begin. . . . Mother, dear if you'll but take a seat. Is't for the tenth or the twelfth time we'm tellin' 'ee that father's neither killed nor wounded?" "Then what is it, on earth?" demanded the voice of Mrs Penhaligon.
She'll look after 'Biades an' see that he don't put 'Lead us, Heavenly Father, lead us' into his mouth, though 'tis where he puts most things." "But you're goin' to the Treat yourself, ma'am?" Nicky-Nan suggested. "What, in this rig-out? Catch me!" answered Mrs Penhaligon, not with literal intention but idiomatically. "No, I'm but goin' up to see 'em off decent.
"I don't speckilate on a thief," she added with vicious intention. "Hush hush!" said 'Bert, and glanced anxiously at his sobbing parent. Nicky-Nan was the worst puzzled of them all. He had promised Sam Penhaligon to do his best when the family shifted quarters: and now Mrs Penhaligon would not hear of his lifting so much as a hand.
Yet no . . . the sound seemed to come rather from the chamber where Mr and Mrs Penhaligon slept. . . . It ceased, and he dropped off to sleep again. Oddly enough he awoke not having given it a thought before with a scare of War upon him. In his dream he had been retracing accurately and in detail a small scene of the previous morning, at the moment quite without significance for him.
"He talked so confident of his money, too. . . . Funny thing if Nicky-Nan, that we've been pityin' all this time, should turn out to be a miser!" An hour later, in the full light of the afternoon sunshine, Nicky-Nan emerged from the old house with a shovel on his arm and a bundle dangling from it. He had heard 'Bert Penhaligon say that the Boy Scouts were employed by night only for coast-watching.
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