“You can get breakfast while I’m gone then,” Ellen said, catching up her coat, “and if I don’t come back pretty soon, you go ahead 94 and eat yours. I’d a thousand times rather ferret out what those Howes are tryin’ to bury than eat. I’d be willin’ to starve to do it.”

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CHAPTER VII

THE UNRAVELING OF THE MYSTERY

LEFT to herself Lucy stood for an instant watching her aunt’s resolute figure make its way under the fringe of lilacs that bordered the driveway. Then she turned her attention to preparing breakfast, and the Howes and their mysterious doings were forgotten.

In the meantime Ellen walked on, skirting the shelter of the hedge until she came into the lee of a clump of elder bushes growing along the margin of the brook at the juncture of the Howe and Webster land. Here she secreted herself and waited.

The brook was quite deep at this point and now, swollen by the snows that had recently melted on the hillsides, purled its path down to the valley in a series of cascades that rippled, foamed, and tinkled merrily.

As she stood concealed beside it, its laughter so outrivaled every other sound that she had difficulty in discerning the Howes’ approaching 96 tread, and it was not until the distinct crackle of underbrush reached her ear that she became aware they were approaching. She peered through the bushes.

96

Yes, there they were, all three of them; and there, firm in their grasp, was the mysterious bag.

It was not large, but apparently it was heavy, and they handled it with extreme care.

“Let’s put it down,” puffed Mary, who was flushed and heated, “an’ look for a good deep place. Ain’t you tired, ’Liza?”

“I ain’t so tired as hot,” Eliza answered. “Warn’t it just providential Martin took it into his head to go to the village this mornin’? I can’t but think of it.”

“It was the luckiest thing I ever knew,” assented Mary. “I don’t know what we’d ’a’ done with this thing round the house another day. I’d ’a’ gone clean out of my mind.”

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