“You don’t know,” was the gloomy answer. “Somebody might have been up in the monument with a spy glass, 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 glass. 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 passed 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.”