Marjy ran up to her room and locked herself in, despite her aunt’s shrill cry: “Come here, Marjy, and help me to look for that money! Oh, I must find it, it cannot be lost!”
Notwithstanding her asseveration, it did seem to be lost. She one moment declared that she was positive that she had locked it in the safe—and scolded and reproached Marjy—then, she railed about Henry, and how impossible it was to trust any one; taking another turn, she doubted herself; she did not know whether or not she put it in the safe at all. “It might be that I took it out after I put it there, and thought it more secure in some other place; but of course I never once thought that Henry would rob me, and he pretended to love you,” she would grumble. Then she would fall to tearing things to pieces again.
Whenever her aunt accused her, Marjy only cried out impatiently: “Oh, nonsense, auntie! What would I do with it?”
“I do not know, I am sure!” weakly.
But when she assailed Henry, then Marjy flew into a tempest of passion. “You know that he could not have touched it; we were all in the room together until he left, and I went to the front door, and closed and locked it after him; he lives two doors away, he couldn’t very well come through the walls,” indignantly.
“That’s so! You must have taken it, then!” hysterically.
“Much more likely that you have hidden it away yourself. Oh, dear! My life is ruined on account of that miserable money! Henry scarcely speaks to me, and says that he will never step inside the house again!”
“I do not see why you should mourn over a thief!” answered Aunt Hattie.
“He isn’t a thief. I would as soon think that you took it yourself,” she cried wrathfully.
Aunt Hattie grew pale with anger: “Take care what you say, miss,” she retorted with quivering lips.