“You don’t sleep well at night,” pursued mother remorselessly. “You twitch about—”
“Yes,” I admitted; “and lie awake listening to the old clock in the hall, and thinking that every second it ticks off is one second less.”
“Well,” said mother, more sternly, “it must stop. It isn’t worth it. Why not be satisfied with thinking that we’re merely on a visit here—a month’s vacation—and plan to make the last days of the visit as pleasant as you can? Then, when we go away, we can at least look back upon having had a nice time.”
“But we don’t want you to go away, Mrs. Truman,” spoke up Tom. “Mother was saying again last night how dreadfully she would feel if you would have to go. As for me, I—I don’t know what I’d do.”
I looked up and met his eyes, and there was something in them that made me feel like laughing and crying too.
“You’ve all been very kind to us,” said mother, flushing with pleasure, “and you must come over to Riverdale and see us often. I want you all to be sure to come over and spend the last evening with us here—a kind of farewell, you know.”
She tried to smile, though it ended a little miserably, and I could see that she was deeply disappointed, too, but was being brave for our sake. I never knew until long afterward how she herself had worked to solve the mystery.
We obeyed her by abandoning the search—indeed, we must soon have stopped from sheer inability to find anything more to do. We had exhausted our ingenuity and our resources—we were at the end. But all that could not prevent me worrying—it had rather the opposite effect; and night after night I lay awake, wondering where the treasure could be. And though I was careful to lie still and breathe regularly, so that mother might not suspect my wakefulness, it was often all I could do to keep myself from crying out under the torture.
In the afternoons, we rambled about the place, or visited each other; but there was a shadow over us which nothing could lift. One day we even made a little excursion to the range of hills which shut us in upon the west. It was from them, so Mr. Chester said, that we might see the sea over the wide plain which sloped away eastward to it; but we didn’t see it. Perhaps the day was not clear enough, or perhaps the sun was too far west to throw back to us the glint of the water; but I fancy I should not have seen it, however favourable the conditions, for I had eyes for little else than the old house nestling among the trees, two miles away. About it, the broad fields looked like the squares of a great chess-board, dark with new-turned earth, or green with the growing wheat.
Dusk was falling as we started toward home. We were all a little tired and very hungry, and we cut across lots, instead of going around by the road. We skirted a field of wheat, and finally came to the back of the orchard, and silently climbed the fence.