But when she had taken a dozen steps on her homeward way, she returned as hastily. Her voice broke again upon the stillness, with a thrill in it of renewed beseeching. "Look here, you! One thing you do, fust thing arter you git away from here. You see 'f you can't find some work an' you do it." The present experience seemed to have fallen away from her. She might have been addressing the boy who also had been wild in those years so long ago. "You keep on this way an' you'll end in jail an' I dunno but suthin' that's wuss. Mebbe nobody won't ketch ye this time,—you better melt the tea-set up soon as ever you can,—but some time they will. Now you mind what I tell ye."
This time she did turn away, and with her light and knowing step plunged into the woods. Once there, as she remembered afterwards, her knees seemed to fail her, but she went weakly on, until, at a good distance from the house, she sat down on a bank under the sighing pines and leaned against a tree to let the cool air touch her face. "My suz!" she breathed. Her mind was all a mingling of past and present, but chiefly it seemed to be invaded by a young face, sullen sometimes like the tramp's, and then again gay with laughter.
When she came to her every-day frame of mind, the woods were still, and to her vivid sensibilities more deserted. She made no doubt the thief was gone in the way she had marked out for him. Ann had a childlike sense that he would believe her, because she meant so well. She took her own path soberly home again, not across the marsh this time, but half the way by the high-road. At one point she caught the sound of voices, subdued to the mysterious note of the hour itself. She stepped over a stone wall and lay down in the damp bracken there, and in a moment, as she expected, the cautious steps went by her on their quest, a party of eight or ten, as she judged, raising her head cautiously from her retreat to look and listen. Then she lay down again, chuckling softly as she did when the mouse escaped, even though it was to gnaw her cheese. And presently she took the road, and so went home.
Ann could not go to bed that night. It was not that she expected news, but she had a feeling that powers were abroad to shape and guide things, and that, though humbly, she must be among them. Perhaps it was the excitement of the time and stirring memories, but, for whatever reason, it seemed to her that her "folks" were all about her, strengthening her to the kindnesses and the loyalties of life. She was not in the habit of praying; but as she lay upon the lounge in the kitchen, between waking and sleep, she kept saying to some hidden power: "You look out for him. Young folks don't know half the time what's best for 'em." And toward morning, in her confused state between life and sleep, she hardly knew whether it was her brother she prayed for or the unknown man. Once she heard a quick, sharp noise as if a window opened. She started up. "Yes, yes!" she called, out of her dream. "You want me? I'm right here." But no one answered, and she settled again to sleep.
It was seven o'clock when she opened her eyes to find the kitchen flooded with light. It was a brilliant day, but she was stiff and cold. After she had started her fire, she went into the bedroom to comb her hair, and glanced into the little blurred mirror she sometimes found her only company. The window was wide, the fresh May air blowing in, and there under the window on the floor was her silver tea-set. Ann sat down before it and gathered it into her arms as if it were a child. The tears ran down her cheeks. "To think," she kept saying, "to think he fetched it back. Only to think on 't!" And while she sat there, very happy with the tea-set in her lap, she heard a step she knew. She came swiftly to her feet. Then she put the silver on her bureau in a shining row, and questioned her face in the glass. The tears were on it still, but that hardly mattered on a face that smiled so hard. But she did wipe away the drops with her apron, and then hurried into the kitchen to meet her visitor. Mrs. John C. was bedraggled from loss of sleep, and defeat sat upon her shining brow.
"Well, Ann," she said gloomily, "I ain't got any news for ye. He wa'n't there, arter all, though there'd been a fire an' they found he cooked himself some eggs. But they're goin' to beat up the woods arter breakfast, an' if he's above ground he's goin' to be took."
Ann could scarcely sober her smiling mouth.
"You tell 'em it's all right," she announced jubilantly. "Where do you s'pose I found it? In my bedroom, arter all."
Mrs. John C. regarded her with blighting incredulity. Ann had been guiltily careless, and yet she expressed no grief over the trouble she had made. It was beyond belief.
"Ann Barstow," said she, "you don't mean to tell me you had this whole township up traipsin' the woods all night, an' me without a wink o' sleep, an' that tea-set in your bedroom, arter all?"