“I don’t think he will,” replied the child, “because I tore up that letter you wrote to him and threw it away.”
“What!” gasped Miss Priscilla. “This is too much!”
“Well, you see, aunty, there was nothing else to do. If he’d got that letter he would have come, and I don’t want him to come, so I tore it up. Don’t write another.”
“I won’t,” said Miss Priscilla, in an ominous voice, and snapping her teeth together with a click.
But half an hour later the Primrose Hall carriage went down toward the village, and inside of it sat a very determined-looking old lady.
She went to Mr. Marks’s office and asked him to get his wagon and follow her home at once, and bring back the young miss and her luggage.
“That firebrand as I saw at your house this morning?” exclaimed the old countryman. “Wal, I guess she won’t be so easy brung.”
He chuckled to himself as he drove along the road behind Miss Priscilla Flint; and when they reached the farm-house, he waited decorously for further orders.
Then the hunt began. For Ladybird was nowhere to be found. Miss Priscilla called in vain. Then Miss Dorinda called. Then they went up and looked in the room which Ladybird had appropriated as her own.
Her three trunks stood there wide open and empty. Their contents were all around: on the bed, on the bureaus, on the chairs, and many of them on the floor. But no trace of the missing child.