She went toward the house, only a few steps away. The cement patch between the grass and the stone wall of the house looked very swept and clean — she had done that herself, dragging the carpet across it. She hurried through the kitchen and straight through the hall. The children had been quiet too long. She was starting upstairs when she heard a sound from the front sitting room — Lily, of course, who would not do as she was told. Lily was lying face down on the bare wooden floor of the front sitting room. She was trying to see between the boards, focusing first with one eye and then with the other, and also trying to focus with her hands, which were bent into blinkers at each side of her face. She looked up at her mother, and her eyes showed that she was ready for the battle.

“Lily, I thought I left you upstairs,” Mrs. Bagot said, and then she stopped. After all, it was not often Lily got a day off from school. “Never mind, Lily. I’m not angry, I’m not anything. It’s only that I don’t like you to be in here by yourself. And why are you trying to see through the floor?”

It was a very short story, quickly told. Lily had been given two pennies, which had been left in safety far out of her reach, on the mantelpiece in the back sitting room, but she had managed to reach them, and she had taken one of them and fitted it between the boards, and it had slipped, and was gone. And all she had been trying to do, all she wanted, was to see whether the penny would fit between the boards.

“I suppose it’s my fault,” Mrs. Bagot said. “I should have let you keep one of them in your hand. Then you wouldn’t have been so curious. Well, you’ll never see that penny again. It’s gone for good. Never mind. It’s happened before, and it will happen again. We were hardly in this house when I lost a sixpence. It fell out of my hand and rolled over there. I nearly had it and then it was gone, down under the house. The foundations of this house must be made of money.”

“When will we get it?” Lily asked.

“Oh, how do I know? They would have to tear up the floorboards. You ask too many questions. Now, are you going to stay here, or will you come upstairs with me?”

“You ask too many questions,” Lily said. “I’ll come upstairs with you.”