For a moment, Mr. Chester continued to stare at them in astonishment; then a peculiar inward convulsion seized him, as though he wanted to sneeze and couldn’t. As I looked at their downcast faces, I felt very much like laughing, but I didn’t dare with Mr. Chester standing there.
“A brilliant scheme!” he commented, at last, in a voice which trembled a little. “May I ask which of you devised it?”
“It was I, sir,” answered Tom, guiltily.
“How did you know that Mr. Tunstall would be here this evening?” queried his father.
“We—we sent him a message by our boy, Jimmy.”
“A message?”
“Yes, sir—that he’d learn something to his advantage if he came out here this afternoon. We knew Mrs. Truman had gone to town.”
“He thought it was mother sent the message,” I remarked.
“And the message was a falsehood,” said Mr. Chester, sternly. “It was, of course, inevitable that they should tell a lie. Go on.”
“Well, Mr. Tunstall came,” said Tom, flushing deeply at his father’s words. “We watched him come up the road and go up to the house and knock and try the front door. Then he wandered around a bit, and finally saw Cecil sitting on the bench there. She’d been digging some more.”