STRANGE DISAPPEARANCES
The very next day after that Maude Wilder’s weekly allowance of thirty
cents was missing from the purse that she had carelessly left on her
table and Ruth Dennis’s gold beads were nowhere to be found.
And now the opinion of the school was divided. The more excitable girls
were convinced that the burglar had actually gotten in, but there were
other girls who were quite as certain that some one inside the house was
the thief. But who?
The servants seemed trustworthy; Nora, the fat, good natured cook, Annie
and Mary, the two neat maids, the two middle aged laundresses who came
in from outside, several days a week; and Charles, the man servant who
might be seen each evening walking out with Annie and Mary beside him.
It was said that Charles divided his attentions so equally between the
two neat maids that if he _had_ been the thief, he would have been
obliged to steal everything in pairs in order to divide them with
absolute fairness between his two friends; so, of course, that let
Charles out. Besides, except when there were trunks to be carried up,
Charles never entered the upstairs rooms.
“Of course it isn’t old Abbie,” said Maude, who was under the front
porch with Henrietta, bolting hot apple pie. “She’s too much of a
rabbit. It’s true she hasn’t any money; but she wouldn’t have gumption
enough to steal pennies from a baby’s bank.”
“Do you think it might be Madame Bolande?” asked Henrietta. “She’s so
fearfully untruthful and so—so unwashed.”
“I wouldn’t put it past her,” said Maude. “Her room is stuffed with
clothes and things; and you know Helen Miller has lost her pleated
skirt.”
“Oh, _Cora_ took that last Sunday. She said she just wouldn’t go to
church in her short one. Besides, she had ripped the hem out and hadn’t
had time to put in a new one. The Miller girls had gone downstairs and
Cora was late, so she just rushed in, grabbed up Helen’s skirt and
scrambled into it. I’ll tell her to put it back—she’s just forgotten
it.”
At the same moment Gladys Evelyn de Milligan and Augusta were marching
up and down the long porch over Maude’s head and Gladys was saying:
“I used to know Marjory Vale in Michigan and I can tell you one thing.
She was a horrid little girl, always telling fibs and taking things that
didn’t belong to her—her aunt couldn’t keep a thing in her ice box. And
Mabel wasn’t anybody at all in Lakeville. And goodness knows how the
Tuckers got money enough to send Bettie to school. They’re as poor as
church mice and have ragged little boys running all over the place.”
“I wonder that you ever knew such people,” said Augusta, always a little
dazzled by Gladys’s magnificence.
“Oh, I didn’t,” denied Gladys, hastily. “I—well, we used to give our old
clothes to the Tuckers.”
This was not true, but as Augusta always believed anything she heard,
she now believed this and many more of Gladys’s unpleasant tales about
the little girls from Upper Michigan and passed them on to her own
particular friends; so, in the course of time, Jean, Mabel, Marjory,
Bettie; and even Henrietta, whom Gladys had _not_ known in Lakeville,
were puzzled and grieved by the odd, unfriendly ways of some of their
once cordial schoolmates.
Isabelle Carew, for instance, snubbed Mabel quite heartlessly at times.
Attractive little Grace Allen no longer spent her leisure moments with
her classmate Marjory; but chummed instead with Ruth Dennis. Alice
Bailey no longer wept on Jean’s shoulder during the Sunday night hymns
but transferred her tears to Hazel Benton’s convenient collar bone.
As for Augusta Lemon, convinced that the Lakeville girls were no fit
associates for any really _nice_ girl, she avoided them as much as
possible and became more and more friendly with gum-chewing Gladys. And,
as usual, Lillian Thwaite always followed as closely as possible in
Augusta’s footsteps.
Losing Augusta and Lillian was not exactly a calamity. Augusta was
rather an insipid maiden, with no sense of humor, and the bright little
girls from Lakeville had considered her something of a bore. And Lillian
was just a silly little person of no great consequence. Still, it was
disconcerting and not quite pleasant to be dropped so suddenly, as
Marjory said, “even by a sheep like Augusta or a goose like Lillian.”
Fortunately, Sallie Dickinson, Maude Wilder, Cora Doyle, Victoria
Webster and little Jane Pool, none of whom admired Gladys, were still
friendly; and there were others.
Just now, too, one of the Lakeville girls was having another trouble. As
you know, mail time for Sallie Dickinson was always rather a trying
time. If Charles returned from the post-office early enough, Sallie
opened the bag in the school room and read aloud the name on each
envelope as she passed it down to its owner. If Charles happened to be
late, Sallie delivered the letters at the girls’ doors.
In either case, there were no letters for Sallie, no little packages
from home—because she had no home—no little surprises like those that
brought delighted squeals from her more fortunate schoolmates. Many of
the more selfish older girls seemed to take Sallie’s letterless
condition very much for granted but the Lakeville girls were decidedly
sorry for her. At times, indeed, their tender hearts quite ached for
Sallie.
But now Sallie was not the only sufferer for lack of mail. For weeks and
weeks and weeks—eight of them to be exact—Mabel had had no letter from
her father and mother who were in Germany. There had been postals from
along the way and one announcing their arrival in Berlin and that was
all.
Mabel possessed a dangerous imagination. It was now hard at work. She
looked at poor old Abbie and at Sallie of the wistful eyes and
shuddered. Was she, too, in danger of becoming a boarding school orphan?
Would she have to wear faded old garments discarded and left behind by
departed schoolmates? Would _she_ grow to look just like Abbie—bent and
hopeless—with a retreating chin and scant, hay-colored hair and a
whining voice?
She asked these harrowing questions and many others of her sympathizing
friends.
“Don’t worry,” soothed Henrietta. “It’s a good four months since I’ve
heard a single word from _my_ father. If he isn’t lost on one of his
exploring expeditions in the heart of India or Africa or Asia, he’s been
arrested for digging up somebody’s old tomb. That’s why I live with my
grandmother, you know. Whenever Father hears of anything interesting to
dig, no matter where it is, he just rushes off to dig it. And of course
he couldn’t do that if he had me tied to his—his suspenders.”
“But you have your grandmother and so much money of your own that you
wouldn’t _need_ to be a school orphan like—like Abbie.”
“Mabel, before I’d let you be like Abbie—and you’d have to shrink an
awful lot to do it and change color besides—I’d adopt you myself. It’s a
promise. If anything _should_ happen to your people, I’ll adopt you, so
there! But don’t worry. Nothing _is_ going to happen.”
While these assurances were cheering, Mabel still looked disconsolately
at Abbie and at Sallie.