Part 19 (1/2)
”Will you please take this to Mr. Meredith? He is probably in the Sunday-school now.”
”Sure. Will you wait for an answer, Miss King?”.
”No, thank you, Walter.”
She rode home and waited anxiously for the personal answer to her note, which came with most unclerical alacrity.
”Colette,” he said, his voice tense, ”if you knew what your little note meant! Did--”
”Wait until I explain, John. I must tell you about the surplice.”
She repeated Amarilly's account of the peregrinations of the robe.
”Well?” he asked bewildered, ”I don't see what that has to do with--”
”Everything. There was something of mine--” she turned a deep crimson--”in the pocket of that surplice.”
”Yours! Why, how did it get there, Colette? Was it--”
”I am not going to tell you--not until I have it back. Oh, I could die of shame when I think who may have found it. You must get it.”
”Colette,” he answered gravely, ”the surplice must have pa.s.sed through many hands, but if it is possible to trace this--article, I will do so.
Still, how can I make inquiries unless I know what it is?”
”You can ask them, each and all, if they found anything in the pocket,”
she replied. ”And you must tell them you left it there.”
”And you won't trust me, Colette? Not after my long unhappy summer. And won't you give me an answer now to the note I wrote you last spring?”
”No; I won't tell you anything! Not until you find that.”
”Be reasonable, Colette.”
His choice of an adjective was most unfortunate for his cause. It was the word of words that Colette detested; doubtless because she had been so often entreated to cultivate that quality.
”I will not,” she answered, ”if to tell you is being reasonable. I must have it back. I think no one will really know to whom it belongs, though they may guess. You must, a.s.sume the owners.h.i.+p.”
”I certainly shall, if it can be found,” he a.s.sured her.
Seeing the utter futility of changing her mood, he took his departure; perhaps a little wiser if not quite so sad as he had been before he saw her. The next morning he called upon Amarilly, whom he found alone with Iry.
”I am very sorry to learn that you had such a hard summer,” he said kindly, ”and I regret that I didn't know more about your affairs before I left the city, but I was too absorbed, I fear, in my own troubles.”
”How did you hear about us?” she asked curiously.
”From Miss King.”
”Oh,” said Amarilly happily, imagining that their trouble must have been patched up. Then another thought occurred to her which gave her a little heart palpitation. With intense anxiety depicted on her lineaments she asked tremulously: ”Did she tell you about the surplus?”
”Amarilly,” and the tone was so rea.s.suring that the little wrinkles of anxiety vanished, ”when I gave you the surplice, I gave it to you unconditionally, and I am very glad that you put it to profit. But, you know, as Miss King told you, that there was something of value--of importance--in that pocket; something that must be found. My happiness depends entirely upon its recovery. Now, she tells me that you can give me the names and addresses of all the people through whose hands it pa.s.sed.”
”Sure thing!” she replied with business-like alacrity. ”You see the Boarder has been larnin' me bookkeepin', and so I keep all our accounts now in a big book the grocer give me.”