"Did he say 'gold'?"
"He did."
They sat down on the couch together, and in whispers Anne told all. Then they looked at each other.
"We must work as lightly as thistle-down," said Miss Lois, "or we shall lose him. He was not in the village to-day, and as he was not, I thought it safer not to inquire about him. I am glad now that I did not. But you are in a high fever, dear child. This suspense must be brought to an end, or it will kill you." She put her arms round Anne and kissed her fondly—an unusual expression of feeling from Miss Lois, who had been brought up in the old-fashioned rigidly undemonstrative New England manner. And the girl put her head down upon her old friend's shoulder and clung to her. But she could not weep; the relief of tears was not yet come.
In the morning they saw the fisherman at the foot of the meadow, and watched him through the blinds, breathlessly. He was so much and so important to them that it seemed as if they must be the same to him. But he was only bringing a string of fish to sell. He drew up his dug-out on the bank, and came toward the house with a rolling step, carrying his fish.
"There's a man here with some fish, that was ordered, he says, by somebody from here," said a voice on the stairs. "Was it you, Mrs. Young?"
"Yes. Come in, Mrs. Blackwell—do. My niece ordered them: you know they're considered very good for an exhausted brain. Perhaps I'd better go down and look at them myself. And, by-the-way, who is this man?"
"It's Sandy Croom; he lives up near the pond."
"Yes, we met him up that way. Is he a German?"
"There's Dutch blood in him, I reckon, as there is in most of the people about here who are not Marylanders," said Mrs. Blackwell, who was a Marylander.