ut it
in the Cyclopedia in the big bookcase. I hunted it up right away, that
first day after the first night when I--I mocked you. I made up my mind
then, and I never unmake minds, that if you'd be decent I'd cure you.
It's nothing but a dreadful bad habit, anyway, and easy done. But not
until you find my--the--Aunt Eunice's brass bound box."

He was gone and back in a flash.

Katharine, starting to follow, paused in the middle of the floor,
arrested by the sight of him standing in one doorway with the glittering
casket in his hands, and of Miss Maitland in another staring at that
which he held as if she saw a ghost.

CHAPTER VIII.

HAY-LOFT DREAMS

All the pretty pink color which had hitherto tinged the lady's cheek had
vanished, and she visibly trembled, so that Katharine darted forward to
her support. But Aunt Eunice raised her hand protestingly, and tottered
forward to the nearest chair. With dry, white lips, she asked in a voice
so low it could barely be heard:

"Montgomery Sturtevant, where--where did you find _that_?"

Her appearance alarmed both the children, who fancied she, also, was
about to faint as Moses had done, yet she did not fall nor did her gaze
waver; and impelled by its sternness to make reply, Monty finally
stammered:

"H-h-h-hay-m-m-ow."

"Hay-mow! Impossible!" returned Miss Maitland, becoming a bit more
natural in appearance, while Kate indignantly turned upon her playmate,
demanding and denying:

"How dare you? He didn't. 'Twas I--under a tree in your own big forest.
I dug it up and fetched it--he fetched--there wasn't a hay-mow anywhere
near it. Oh, Aunt Eunice, it's the Magic Treasure. It holds the key to
all the world--to all the good things in the world, anyway. And you're
the wonderful Wise Woman will open it and let us use the gold and
diamonds and precious stones to make all the poor people rich and glad.
'Tis yours, I know, and quick, quick!"

With a bound she seized the box from Monty's hands and brought it to the
disturbed lady, who, when the girl would have placed it on her lap,
recoiled as from some venomous thing.

"No, no! Don't bring it to me. I wouldn't touch it. It has wrought evil
already, and so great--"

Then she abruptly paused and steadfastly regarded the quaint old casket
which, as Katharine had discovered, seemed to have neither lock nor
fastening, and was in itself a marvellous piece of mechanism. As she
gazed her thought was busy as painful, bu