card-table and writhed
with joy. "To have seen your face, Minnie!" she panted, wiping her eyes.
"To have thought you had Dick Carter's letters, that I keep rolled
in asbestos, and then to have opened them and found they were to Miss
Cobb!"

"Be as happy as you like," I snapped, "but you are barking up the wrong
tree. I don't know anything about any letters and as far as that goes,
do you think I've lived here fourteen years to get into the wrong room
at night? If I'd wanted to get into your room, I'd have found your room,
not Miss Cobb's."

She sat up and pulled her hat straight, looking me right in the eye.

"If you'll recall," she said, "I came into the spring-house, and
Arabella pulled that--garment of Miss Cobb's off a table. It was
early--nobody was out yet. You were alone, Minnie, or no," she said
suddenly, "you were not alone. Minnie, WHO was in the pantry?"

"What has that to do with it?" I managed, with my feet as cold as stone.

She got up and buttoned her sweater.

"Don't trouble to lie," she said. "I can see through a stone wall
as well as most people. Whoever got those letters thought they were
stealing mine, and there are only two people who would try to steal my
letters; one is Dick Carter, and the other is his brother-in-law. It
wasn't Sam in the pantry--he came in just after with his little snip of
a wife."

"Well?" I managed.

But she was smiling again, not so pleasantly.

"I might have known it!" she said. "What a fool I've been, Minnie, and
how clever you are under that red thatch of yours! Dicky can not appear
as long as I am here, and Pierce takes his place, and I help to keep the
secret and to play the game! Well, I can appreciate a joke on myself as
well as most people, but--Minnie, Minnie, think of that guilty wretch of
a Dicky Carter shaking in the pantry!"

"I don't know what you are talking about," I said, but she only winked
and went to the door.

"Don't take it too much to heart," she advised. "Too much loyalty is
a vice, not a virtue. And another piece of advice, Minnie--when I find
Dicky Carter, stand from under; something will fall."

They had charades during the rest hour that afternoon, the overweights
headed by the bishop, against the underweights headed by Mr. Moody. They
selected their words from one of Horace Fletcher's books, and as Mr.
Pierce wasn't either over or underweight, they asked him to be referee.

Oh, they were crazy about him by that time. It was "Mr. C