CHAPTER XLI.
WHAT JERRIE FOUND UNDER THE FLOOR.
Meantime Jerrie had gone back to the wreck of the table, which she tried to straighten up, handling it as carefully and as reverently as if it had been her mother's coffin she was touching.

One of the legs had been broken off before, and she and Harold has fastened it on and turned it to the side of the house where it would be more out of the way of harm, and it was this leg which had succumbed first to the force of Peterkin's fist, and as the entire pressure of the table was brought to bear upon it in falling, it had been precipitated through a hole in the base board, which had been there as long as she could remember the place, not so large at first, but growing larger each year, as the decaying boards crumbled or were eaten away by rats.
Jerrie called it a rat-hole, and had several times put a trap there to catch the marauders, who sometimes scampered across her very feet, so accustomed were they to her presence.

But the rats would not go into the trap, and then she pasted a newspaper over the hole, but this had been torn, and hung in shreds, while the hole grew gradually larger.
Taking up the top of the table, Jerrie dragged it to the centre of the room, and, putting three of the legs upon it, went to search for the fourth, one end of which was just visible at the aperture in the wall.
As she stooped to take it out, a bit of the floor under her feet gave way, making the opening so large that the table leg disappeared from view entirely.

Then Jerrie went down upon her knees, and, thrusting her hand under the floor, felt for the missing leg, striking against stones, and brushes, and bits of mortar, and finally touching something from which she recoiled for an instant, it was so cold and slimy.
But she struck it again in her search, this time more squarely, and, grasping it hard in her hand, brought it out to the light, while an undefinable thrill, half of terror, half of joy, ran through her frame, as she held it up and examined it carefully.
It was a small hand-bag of Russian leather, covered with mold and stained with the damp of its long hiding-place, while a corner of it showed that the rats had tested its properties, but, disliking either the taste or the smell had left it in quiet.

And there under the floor, not two feet from where Jerrie had often played, it had lain ever since the wintry night years before when on the table a strange woman had struggled with death, and in her struggle the bag, which held so much that was important to the child beside her, had probably fallen from her rude bed into the hole just behind it, and which was then large enough to receive it.