Nancy laughed. Six months before, if anyone had told her that she would be going to visit her Uncle Thomas on that particular day, she would have thought the prophet quite mad; as it was she could hardly believe her ears.
"I'd _love_ to do it. Here's the school now--it won't take me a minute to get ready. You speak to Miss Leland, Uncle Thomas. I'm quite sure that I can go."
A little more than an hour later Nancy found herself turning in the very old gate through the unfriendly bars of which she and Alma had peered on that distant rainy afternoon, feeling that they were gazing into a forbidden country. Yet now nothing, it seemed, could be more natural than that she should be sitting beside her uncle, chatting away with him unconstrainedly. Only the fact that he never mentioned her mother, nor suggested that she should even peep into the little brown house, made her feel uncomfortable. Furthermore, he showed the same coldness on the subject of Alma, so that, in a way, Nancy felt that somehow she had almost unfairly won his affection for herself alone, and that she was enjoying a pleasure in which her mother and sister should have had an equal share. On the other hand, she decided, at length, to say nothing either to Alma or to Mrs. Prescott about her visit; only because she was afraid that the knowledge of it might again lead them to false hopes, and to follies stimulated by those hopes. She felt sure that her uncle had come to see her, only because he had taken her at her word; that is to say, that he counted on her not in any way misunderstanding the purpose of his visit, or fancying that it gave promise of his relenting in his long-standing determination not to solve their financial problems for them.
Aside from the fact that, although within a mile of the little brown cottage, she might have been a league away, and that she experienced several bad qualms of homesickness, Nancy thoroughly enjoyed that day. She lunched with her uncle in the big dining-room, sitting at the head of his table, while he placed himself at the foot. And afterwards he showed her about the huge old house, taking her to his laboratory, explaining a great deal about scientific experiments which she did not understand, showing her his books and his curios. As they passed along the corridor on the second floor, he paused a moment outside a room which was closed. Then as if on a sudden impulse, he took a key out of his pocket, and opened the door, without saying anything. It was a small room, rather bare, furnished with an almost Spartan simplicity; the sunlight beamed in, striking its full, red rays on the faded wall above the narrow, white iron bed, over which hung a picture of a lion-hunt, evidently cut out of some book or magazine--just such a picture as would strike the imagination of a lad of twelve. The rest of the wall was mottled with other pictures, many of them unframed, clipped out of colored newspapers, and fixed to the wall-paper with pins; pictures of horses and steeple-chases, and Greek athletes, and American heroes; one, the largest, was a vivid representation of the Battle of Trafalgar, showing a perfect inferno of red and yellow flames and bursting bombs, and splintered ships, and drowning sailors clinging to planks and spars. On the table between the windows stood a row of books, a few ill-treated looking lesson books hobnobbing like poor relations with other more self-confident works on "Woodcraft" and "Adventure." The mantelpiece was burdened with a heterogeneous collection of boyish knickknacks, such as a sling, a bird's-nest, a rusty bowie-knife, and a decrepit old horse-pistol.