And the change was towards Richard, too. She had never seemed to like him much better than his dog. She blamed him for taking the cream bottles when they played pirate, and she thought it made little girls boisterous and rude to play with boys, and she wondered at Barby's letting Georgina play with him. Several times she had done her wondering out loud, so that Georgina heard her, and wanted to say things back--shocking things, such as Rosa said to Joseph. But she never said them. There was always that old silver porringer, sitting prim and lady-like upon the sideboard.

Things were different to-day. After the dog's paws were wiped dry Tippy asked Richard how he felt after the accident, and she asked it as if she really cared and wanted to know. And she brought in a plate of early summer apples, the first in the market, and told him to help himself and put some in his pocket. And there was the checker-board if they wanted to play checkers or dominoes. Her unusual concern for their entertainment impressed Georgina more than anything else she could have done with the seriousness of the danger they had been in. She felt very solemn and important, and thanked Tippy with a sweet, patient air, befitting one who has just been brought up from the "valley of the shadow."

The moment they were alone Richard began breathlessly:

"Say. On the way here I went by that place where we buried the pouch, and what do you think? The markers are out of sight and the whole place itself is buried--just filled up level. What are we going to do about it?"

The seriousness of the situation did not impress Georgina until he added, "S'pose the person who lost it comes back for it? Maybe we'd be put in prison."

"But n.o.body knows it's buried except you and me."

Richard scuffed one shoe against the other and looked into the fire.

"But Aunt Letty says there's no getting around it, 'Be sure your sin will find you out,' always. And I'm awfully unlucky that way. Seems to me I never did anything in my life that I oughtn't to a done, that I didn't get found out. Aunt Letty has a book that she reads to me sometimes when I'm going to bed, that proves it. Every story in it proves it. One is about a traveler who murdered a man, and kept it secret for twenty years. Then he gave it away, talking in his sleep. And one was a feather in a boy's coat pocket. It led to its being found out that he was a chicken thief. There's about forty such stories, and everyone of them prove your sin is sure to find you out some time before you die, even if you cover it up for years and years."

"But we didn't do any sin," protested Georgina. "We just buried a pouch that the dog found, to keep it safe, and if a big wind came along and covered it up so we can't find it, that isn't our fault. We didn't make the wind blow, did we?"

"But there was gold money in that pouch," insisted Richard, "and it wasn't ours, and maybe the letter was important and we ought to have turned it over to Dad or Uncle Darcy or the police or somebody."

Aunt Letty's bedtime efforts to keep Richard's conscience tender were far more effective than she had dreamed. He was quoting Aunt Letty now.

"We wouldn't want anybody to do _our_ things that way." Then a thought of his own came to him, "You wouldn't want the police coming round and taking you off to the lockup, would you? I saw 'em take Binney Rogers one time, just because he broke a window that he didn't mean to. He was only shying a rock at a sparrow. There was a cop on each side of him a hold of his arm, and Binney's mother and sister were following along behind crying and begging them not to take him something awful. But all they could say didn't do a speck of good."

The picture carried weight. In spite of her light tone Georgina was impressed, but she said defiantly:

"Well, n.o.body saw us do it."

"You don't know," was the gloomy answer. "Somebody might have been up in the monument with a spy gla.s.s, looking down. There's always people up there spying around, or out on the masts in the harbor, and if some sleuth was put on the trail of that pouch the first thing that would happen would be he'd come across the very person with the gla.s.s. It always happens that way, and I know, because Binney Rogers has read almost all the detective stories there is, and he said so."

A feeling of uneasiness began to clutch at Georgina's interior. Richard spoke so knowingly and convincingly that she felt a real need for blackberry cordial. But she said with a defiant little uplift of her chin:

"Well, as long as we didn't mean to do anything wrong, I'm not going to get scared about it. I'm just going to bear up and steer right on, and keep hoping that everything will turn out all right so hard that it will."

Her "line to live by" buoyed her up so successfully for the time being, that Richard, too, felt the cheerful influence of it, and pa.s.sed to more cheerful subjects.

"We're going to be in all the papers," he announced. "A reporter called up from Boston to ask Cousin James how it happened. There's only been a few cases like ours in the whole United States. Won't you feel funny to see your name in the paper? Captain Kidd will have his name in, too. I heard Cousin James say over the telephone that he was the hero of the hour; that if he hadn't given the alarm we wouldn't have been discovered till it was too late."

Richard did not stay long. The finished portrait was to be hung in the Art gallery in the Town Hall that morning and he wanted to be on hand at the hanging. Later it would be sent to the New York exhibition.

"Daddy's going to let me go with him when Mr. Locke comes for him on his yacht. He's going to take me because I sat still and let him get such a good picture. It's the best he's ever done. We'll be gone a week."

"When are you going?" demanded Georgina.

"Oh, in a few days, whenever Mr. Locke comes."

"I hope we can find that pouch first," she answered. Already she was beginning to feel little and forlorn and left behind. "It'll be awful lonesome with you and Barby both gone."

Tippy came in soon after Richard left and sat down at the secretary.

"I've been thinking I ought to write to your mother and let her know about yesterday's performance before she has a chance to hear it from outsiders or the papers. It's a whole week to-day since she left."

"A week," echoed Georgina. "Is that all? It seems a month at least. It's been so long."

Mrs. Triplett tossed her a calendar from the desk.

"Count it up for yourself," she said. "She left two days before your birthday and this is the Wednesday after."

While Mrs. Triplett began her letter Georgina studied the calendar, putting her finger on a date as she recalled the various happenings of it. Each day had been long and full. That one afternoon when she and Richard found the paper in the rifle seemed an age in itself. It seemed months since they had promised Belle and Uncle Darcy to keep the secret.

She glanced up, about to say so, then bit her tongue, startled at having so nearly betrayed the fact of their having a secret. Then the thought came to her that Emmett's sin had found him out in as strange a way as that of the man who talked in his sleep or the chicken thief to whom the feather clung. It was one more proof added to the forty in Aunt Letty's book. Richard's positiveness made a deeper impression on her than she liked to acknowledge. She shut her eyes a moment, squinting them up so tight that her eyelids wrinkled, and hoped as hard as she could hope that everything would turn out all right.

"What on earth is the matter with you, child?" exclaimed Tippy, looking up from her letter in time to catch Georgina with her face thus screwed into wrinkles.

Georgina opened her eyes with a start.

"Nothing," was the embarra.s.sed answer. "I was just thinking."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER XVII

IN THE KEEPING OF THE DUNES

SCARCELY had Georgina convinced herself by the calendar that it had been only one short week since Barby went away instead of the endlessly long time it seemed, than a letter was brought in to her.

"MY DEAR LITTLE RAINBOW-MAKER," it began.

"You are surely a prism your own self, for you have made a blessed bright spot in the world for me, ever since you came into it. I read your letter to papa, telling all about your birthday and the prism Uncle Darcy gave you. It cheered him up wonderfully. I was so proud of you when he said it was a fine letter, and that he'd have to engage you as a special correspondent on his paper some day.

"At first the doctors thought his sight was entirely destroyed, by the flying gla.s.s of the broken windshield, but now they are beginning to hope that one eye at least may be saved, and possibly the other. Papa is very doubtful about it himself, and gets very despondent at times. He had just been having an especially blue morning when your letter was brought in, and he said, when I read it:

"'That _is_ a good line to live by, daughter,' and he had me get out his volume of Milton and read the whole sonnet that the line is taken from. The fact that Milton was blind when he wrote it made it specially interesting to him.

"He and mamma both need me sorely now for a little while, Baby dear, and if you can keep busy and happy without me I'll stay away a couple of weeks longer and help take him home to Kentucky, but I can't be contented to stay unless you send me a postal every day. If nothing more is on it than your name, written by your own little fingers, it will put a rainbow around my troubles and help me to be contented away from you."

Georgina spent the rest of the morning answering it. She had a feeling that she must make up for her father's neglect as a correspondent, by writing often herself. Maybe the family at Grandfather Shirley's wouldn't notice that there was never any letter with a Chinese stamp on it, addressed in a man's big hand in Barby's pile of mail, if there were others for her to smile over.

It had been four months since the last one came. Georgina had kept careful count, although she had not betrayed her interest except in the wistful way she watched Barby when the postman came. It made her throat ache to see that little shadow of disappointment creep into Barby's lovely gray eyes and then see her turn away with her lips pressed together tight for a moment before she began to hum or speak brightly about something else. No Chinese letter had come in her absence to be forwarded.

Georgina wished her father could know how very much Barby cared about hearing from him. Maybe if his attention were called to it he would write oftener. If the editor of a big newspaper like Grandfather Shirley, thought her letters were good enough to print, maybe her father might pay attention to one of them. A resolve to write to him some day began to shape itself in her mind.

She would have been surprised could she have known that already one of her epistles was on its way to him. Barby had sent him the "rainbow letter." For Barby had not drawn off silent and hurt when his letters ceased to come, as many a woman would have done.

"Away off there in the interior he has missed the mails," she told herself. "Or the messenger he trusted may have failed to post his letters, or he may be ill. I'll not judge him until I know."