own
upon us and I had to put away my paraphernalia, emerge from my dark
retreat and fly around to entertain them.

The next day Cecil came in and said:

"Did you hear, Amy, that Mr. Carroll has lost a pocketbook with five
hundred dollars in it?"

"No!" I exclaimed. "How? When? Where?"

"Don't overwhelm a fellow. I can answer only one question--last night.
As to the 'how,' they don't know, and as to the 'where'--well, if they
knew that, there might be some hope of finding it. The girls are in a
bad way. The money was to get them their longed-for piano, it seems,
and now it's gone."

"But how did it happen, Cecil?"

"Well, Mr. Carroll says that Mrs. Carroll handed the pocketbook back
to him at the gate yesterday, and he dropped it in the inside pocket
of his over-coat--"

"I saw him do it," I cried.

"Yes, and then, before he went to be photographed, he hung his coat up
in the hall. It hung there until the evening, and nobody seems to have
thought about the money, each supposing that someone else had put it
carefully away. After tea Mr. Carroll put on the coat and went to see
somebody over at Netherby. He says the thought of the pocketbook never
crossed his mind; he had forgotten all about putting it in that coat
pocket. He came home across the fields about eleven o'clock and found
that the cows had broken into the clover hay, and he had a great chase
before he got them out. When he went in, just as he entered the door,
the remembrance of the money flashed over him. He felt in his pocket,
but there was no pocketbook there; he asked his wife if she had taken
it out. She had not, and nobody else had. There was a hole in the
pocket, but Mr. Carroll says it was too small for the pocketbook to
have worked through. However, it must have done so--unless someone
took it out of his pocket at Netherby, and that is not possible,
because he never had his coat off, and it was in an inside pocket.
It's not likely that they will ever see it again. Someone may pick it
up, of course, but the chances are slim. Mr. Carroll doesn't know his
exact path across the fields, and if he lost it while he was after the
cows, it's a bluer show still. They've been searching all day, of
course. The girls are awfully disappointed."

A sudden recollection came to me of Ned Brooke's face as I had seen it
the day before at the gate, coupled with the remembrance of seeing him
walking down the lane at a quick pace, so unlike his usual shambling
g