More than Dot expressed a desire to see Neale at the old Corner House.

Agnes had gone about all the morning openly wondering where Neale could have gone, and what he had gone for.

"I think he's just too mean for anything," she said to Ruth, querulously, when the older girl came home from market.

"Who is mean?" Ruth returned absently.

"Neale. To go off and never say a word to us. I am offended."

Had Agnes' mind not been so strongly set upon the subject of Neale O'Neil's defection she would surely have noticed how Ruth's hands trembled and how her face flushed and paled by turns.

"Never mind about Neale O'Neil," the older sister said, rather impatiently for her.

"Well, I just do mind!" Agnes declared. "He has no business to have secrets from us. Aren't we his best friends?"

"Perhaps he doesn't consider us such," said Ruth, who would have been amused by her sister's seriousness at another time. "There's Joe Eldred.

Perhaps he knows where Neale has gone."

"Joe Eldred!" cried Agnes. "If I thought Neale had taken a mere boy into his confidence and hadn't told me, I'd never speak to him again! At least," she temporized, knowing her own failing, "I never would forgive him!"

"Never mind worrying about Neale," Ruth said again. "Come into the sitting room. I want to show you something."

Agnes followed her rather grumpily. To her mind there was nothing just then so important as Neale O'Neil's absence and the mystery thereof.

Ruth turned to her when the door was closed and started to open her purse and her lips at the same time. Her eyes sparkled; her cheeks were deeply flushed. She looked just as eager and excited as ever quiet, composed Ruth Kenway could look.

"Oh, Aggie!" she quavered.

"Well!" said Agnes, querulously. "I don't care. He-"

"Never mind Neale O'Neil!" cried Ruth, for a third time, and quite exasperated with her sister.

She closed her purse again and ran across the room. She looked behind the machine. Then she pulled the machine away from the wall so that she could get down on her knees and creep behind it.

"What's the matter with you, Ruthie?" asked Agnes, finally awakening to her sister's strange behavior. "What are you looking for?"

"Where-where is it? Where has it gone?" gasped Ruth, still on hands and knees.

"What _are_ you after, Ruth Kenway?" cried Agnes again. "Oh! are you looking for that old sc.r.a.p-book I found upstairs in the garret?"

"Yes," answered Ruth, quaveringly.

"Why? Did you see what was in it?" demanded her sister.

"Yes," Ruth said again.

"Wasn't it funny? All that counterfeit money and those old bonds. Neale and I looked at it Christmas Eve."

"Neale?" gasped Ruth, getting upon her feet, but sitting down in a chair quickly as though her knees were too weak to bear her up.

"Oh, dear me!" rattled on Agnes. "Wouldn't it have been _great_ if the money and bonds were good? Why! it would have been a fortune. Neale added it all up."

"But what became of the book?" Ruth finally got a chance to ask again.

"Oh! Neale took it."

"Neale took it?"

"Yes."

"What for?"

"Why, I don't know. He was curious. He said maybe the bonds were worth something and he'd find out. Of course, that is silly," said Agnes, lightly, "and I told him so."

"And didn't he bring all that money back?" gasped Ruth.

"'All that money,'" repeated Agnes, with laughter. "How tragic you sound-just as though it were not stage money. And I wish it were not!"

"He-he didn't return the book?" asked Ruth, controlling herself with difficulty.

"Not yet. He went away so suddenly. Mean thing! I'd just like to know where he's gone."

Agnes was quite unaware of her sister's trouble. Her own mind reverted to Neale's strange absence as of more importance. Ruth began to be troubled by that same query, too. Where _was_ Neale O'Neil? And what had he done with the old alb.u.m found in the Corner House garret?

The ten dollar bill Ruth had had examined at the bank that morning was one she had taken out of the old volume!

CHAPTER X

WHAT MR. CON MURPHY DID NOT KNOW

The children saw Dr. Forsyth coming out of Sammy Pinkney's house that afternoon and they ran to ask him how their neighbor was getting on.

"For we're awful int'rested in Sammy," Dot explained. "I'm int'rested because he's going to be a pirate, and Tess is int'rested because he gave her a goat."

"You children stay across the street where you are," commanded the busy doctor, getting briskly into his automobile. "You're quite near enough to me. This is my last call and I'm going home now to fumigate my clothing."

"Oh, dear me!" cried Dot, "has Sammy scarlet fever and quarantine, _both?_"

"Huh?" said the doctor, trying his starter. Then he laughed. "I should say he had. And you children must stay away from there. It's bad enough to have one scarlet fever patient on Willow Street. I don't want an epidemic."

That last puzzled Dot a good deal. She went back into the house very soberly when the doctor drove away.

"Mrs. MacCall," she asked, "what is a epidermis? Dr. Forsyth doesn't want one."

"Well, that's 'no skin off your nose,' Dot," said Agnes, giggling at her own fun.