And now the opinion of the school was divided. The more excitable girls were convinced that the burglar had actually gotten in, but there were other girls who were quite as certain that some one inside the house was the thief. But who?
The servants seemed trustworthy; Nora, the fat, good natured cook, Annie and Mary, the two neat maids, the two middle aged laundresses who came in from outside, several days a week; and Charles, the man servant who might be seen each evening walking out with Annie and Mary beside him. It was said that Charles divided his attentions so equally between the two neat maids that if he had been the thief, he would have been obliged to steal everything in pairs in order to divide them with absolute fairness between his two friends; so, of course, that let Charles out. Besides, except when there were trunks to be carried up, Charles never entered the upstairs rooms.
“Of course it isn’t old Abbie,” said Maude, who was under the front porch with Henrietta, bolting hot apple pie. “She’s too much of a rabbit. It’s true she hasn’t any money; but she wouldn’t have gumption enough to steal pennies from a baby’s bank.”
“Do you think it might be Madame Bolande?” asked Henrietta. “She’s so fearfully untruthful and so—so unwashed.”
“I wouldn’t put it past her,” said Maude. “Her room is stuffed with clothes and things; and you know Helen Miller has lost her pleated skirt.”
“Oh, Cora took that last Sunday. She said she just wouldn’t go to church in her short one. Besides, she had ripped the hem out and hadn’t had time to put in a new one. The Miller girls had gone downstairs and Cora was late, so she just rushed in, grabbed up Helen’s skirt and scrambled into it. I’ll tell her to put it back—she’s just forgotten it.”
At the same moment Gladys Evelyn de Milligan and Augusta were marching up and down the long porch over Maude’s head and Gladys was saying:
“I used to know Marjory Vale in Michigan and I can tell you one thing. She was a horrid little girl, always telling fibs and taking things that didn’t belong to her—her aunt couldn’t keep a thing in her ice box. And Mabel wasn’t anybody at all in Lakeville. And goodness knows how the Tuckers got money enough to send Bettie to school. They’re as poor as church mice and have ragged little boys running all over the place.”
“I wonder that you ever knew such people,” said Augusta, always a little dazzled by Gladys’s magnificence.
“Oh, I didn’t,” denied Gladys, hastily. “I—well, we used to give our old clothes to the Tuckers.”