The Corner House Girls' Odd Find

“No. Nobody at all here. It was hidden in our garret by Lemuel Aden when he was here the last time to see Uncle Peter.”

“Goodness me!” cried Agnes. “Lemuel Aden? That wicked old miser?”

“Yes.”

“But how do you know, Ruth Kenway? I thought he died in a poorhouse?”

“He did. That was like the miser he was.”

“But, if he’s dead – ?” But Agnes did not follow the idea to its conclusion.

“Why, don’t you see,” Ruth hastened to say. “The money belongs to Mr. Aden’s nieces – Mrs. Eland and Miss Pepperill. And they need it so!”

“Oh, my goodness! so it does!”

“And we have lost it!” finished Ruth, in despair.

“Well! they can’t blame us,” Agnes said, swift to be upon the defensive.

“But I blame myself. I should have taken more care of the book, in the first place.”

“Then you don’t blame Neale?” demanded Agnes, quickly.

“He’s to blame for carrying the book off without saying anything about it to us,” said Ruth. “But I am mainly at fault.”

“No,” said Barnabetta suddenly. “I’m to blame. If I had left the book in the bag on the porch, you girls would have found it all right, and the money would not have been stolen.”

“I don’t see how you make that out,” Agnes said. “If the robber found the book in that closet where you hid it, why couldn’t he have found it anywhere else in the house?”

“Perhaps not if I had locked it in the silver safe in the pantry,” Ruth said slowly.

“Oh, well! what does it matter who’s at fault?” Agnes demanded, impatiently. “The money’s gone.”

“Yes, it’s gone,” repeated her sister. “And poor Mrs. Eland and Miss Pepperill, who need it so much, will never see it.”

“You girls worry a lot over other folks’ troubles,” said Barnabetta. “And those women you tell about don’t even know that their grandfather left the money, do they?”

“Their uncle,” corrected Ruth.

“Of course not,” said Agnes, in reply to Barnabetta, and quite subdued now by Ruth’s revelation regarding the probable owners of the fortune. “But, you see, Barnabetta, they are our friends; and we wanted very much to help them, anyway.”

“And it did seem as though Providence must have sent us to that corner of the garret that evening, just so Agnes should find the old album,” added Ruth.

“But I wish I hadn’t found it!” wailed Agnes, suddenly. “Just see the trouble we’re in.”

“Then I guess ’twasn’t providential your goin’ there, was it?” demanded Barnabetta.

“We can’t say that,” responded Ruth, thoughtfully.

“You Corner House girls are the greatest!” burst out the trapeze performer. “I never saw anybody like you! Do you spend all your time tryin’ to help other folks?”

“Why – we help when we can and where we can,” Ruth said.

“It’s lots of fun, too,” put in Agnes. “It’s nice to make friends.”

“Why – I believe it must be,” sighed Barnabetta. “But I never thought of it – just so. I never saw folks like you Corner House girls before. That’s what made me feel so mean when I had robbed you.”

“Oh, don’t let’s talk any more about that,” Ruth said, with her old kindness of tone and manner. “We’ll forget it.”

But Barnabetta said, seriously: “I never can. Don’t think it! I’m goin’ to remember it all the days of my life. And I know it’s my fault that you’ve lost all the money.”

Ruth returned the poker to its place, and Agnes swept up the chips of wood and the bits of the broken lock. Ruth carefully put away the big old book Agnes had found in the garret.

“Locking the barn after the horse is stolen,” commented Agnes.

Ruth felt that she could not finish that letter to Mr. Howbridge. There was no haste about it. She could wait to tell him all about the catastrophe when he returned to Milton. Advice now was of no value to her. The fortune was gone. Indeed, she shrank from talking about it any more. Talk would not bring the treasure back, that was sure.

She had not Agnes’ overpowering curiosity. There was a sort of dumb ache at Ruth’s heart, and she sighed whenever she remembered poor Mrs. Eland and her sister.

If Dr. Forsyth was to be believed, a long, long rest was Miss Pepperill’s only cure. News from the State Hospital had assured the friends of the unfortunate school teacher that she would soon be at liberty.

But she might then lapse into a morose and unfortunate state of mind, unless she could rest, have a surcease of worry, and a change of scene. How could poor Mrs. Eland leave her position to care for her sister? And how could either of them go away for a year or two to rest, with their small means?

It was, indeed, a very unfortunate condition of affairs. That the hospital matron knew nothing as yet about the fortune which should be her own and her sister’s, made it no better in Ruth’s opinion.

The more volatile Agnes could not be expected to feel so deeply the misfortune that had overtaken them. Besides, Agnes had one certain reason for being put in a happier frame of mind by the discovery they had just made.

The cloud of suspicion that had been raised in her thoughts by circumstantial evidence, no longer rested upon Neale O’Neil. If Neale would only “get over his mad fit,” as Agnes expressed it, she thought she would be quite happy once more.

For never having possessed a hundred thousand dollars in fact, Agnes Kenway was not likely to weep much over its loss. The vast sum of money had really been nothing tangible to her.

Only for an hour or so after Ruth had been to the bank the second time and made sure that the money in the old album was legal tender, had Agnes really been convinced of its value. Then her thought had flown immediately to the possibility of their buying the long-wished-for automobile.

But the tempting possibility had no more than risen above the horizon of her mind than it had been eclipsed by the horrid discovery that a robber had relieved them of the treasure trove.

“So, that’s all there is to that!” sighed Agnes to herself. “I guess the Corner House family won’t ride in a car yet awhile.”

When Ruth had spoken about Mrs. Eland and her sister, however, saying that the money really belonged to them, this thought finally gained a place in Agnes’ mind, too. She was not at all a selfish girl, and she began to think that perhaps an automobile would not have been forthcoming after all.

“Goodness! what a little beast I am,” she told herself in secret. “To think only of our own pleasure. Maybe, if the money hadn’t been lost, Mrs. Eland would have given us enough out of it to buy the car. But just see what good could have come to poor Miss Pepperill and Mrs. Eland if the money had reached their hands.

“Mercy me!” pursued the next-to-the-oldest Corner House girl. “If I ever find a battered ten cent piece again, I’ll believe it’s good until it’s proved to be lead. Just think! If I’d only had faith in that money in the old book being good, I’d have shouted loud enough to wake up the whole household, and surely somebody – Mrs. MacCall, or Ruth – would have kept me from letting poor Neale take the book away.

“Poor Neale!” she sighed again. “It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t believe that paper was any good – and those bonds. Of course he didn’t. I – I wonder if he showed the bonds and money to anybody at all?”

This thought was rather a startling one. Her boy friend had taken the old album away from the Corner House in the first place with the avowed purpose of showing the bonds to somebody who would know about such things.

Of course, he did not show them to Mr. Con Murphy, the cobbler. And it did not seem as though he had had time on Christmas morning to show the book to anybody else before he went to Tiverton.