“I was looking in to see if there was any one at home,” he tried to explain, while Olaf supplemented:
“On such a fine day he was afraid you might all be out.”
“I went up the mountain to see if I could get back my note-book,” Dabney went on to account for his forlorn condition. “I have been looking for hours, but I couldn’t find it.”
“Maybe the bear put it in her pocket and went away with it,” suggested Christina flippantly. “Anyway, it would be soaked to a pulp by this time.”
“You needn’t worry, I picked it up last night when I went back to get the milk-can,” Olaf said. He brought the familiar leather-covered book from an inside pocket and held it out to its owner. A wicked twinkle that he could not suppress seemed to fill Dabney Mills with panic-stricken suspicion.
“You’ve been reading it,” he cried. “You had no right. You have been prying into my private affairs.”
The other boy’s face flushed with anger.
“It may be I haven’t been brought up a gentleman like you,” he returned hotly. “But I wouldn’t be peering and prying into other people’s business for all that. Whatever mean secrets you have hid away in that book, they are there still, safe and sound. All I did was to write a page at the end. I was afraid that if you didn’t have an account of that bear business at once, you might forget just how it happened.”
Dabney snatched the book and nervously turned to the last page. Beatrice was so close that she could not help seeing that it was covered with Olaf’s square schoolboy writing. The last sentence caught her eye, giving a clue to the rest.
“Even though our hero took the precaution of getting behind the lady who was with him, he did not escape entirely unharmed.”