“And I,” returned Betsey gravely, “if I can once get the first one, I can go on to the end. It is just at the beginning that I always come to grief.”
“Perhaps you could help me and I could help you,” David suggested excitedly. “I would sleep easier at night if I could once get those three pyramids into my head. I have my book in that corner up at the ruined house. I believe we have time to look it up before you must go home. Come up, Dobbin!”
The willing old horse strode forward again.
“It’s not just geometry that bothers me,” Elizabeth confessed. “We had some questions in history to-day and it frightened me to have them show how little I knew. We were asked who were the Barbary pirates and what was the greatest time of America’s merchant marine. Those are just the things I never can remember.”
“History doesn’t seem so hard,” returned David, “except that, if you study it without a teacher, you get so interested in some parts that you forget to pay any attention to the others. You say that they asked you about the merchant marine and America’s ships? Now I never thought of paying any attention to that. Hurry, Dobbin. I begin to think that we have no time to lose.”
They turned into Somerset Lane, hastened up the final slope and left the white horse tied to the cottage gate. Miss Miranda seemed to be still at work in the garden, so they deposited Dick and the package of eggs in the kitchen and went scurrying across the lawn to the gate in the wall. If they were to vanquish their common enemy before dark it was necessary to make some speed.
The key of the gate stood in the lock, but was stiff and rusty and creaked as David forced its turning. They hurried along the grassy path, stooping under the low-hanging branches and brushing aside the unpruned shrubs. For some reason they trod more quietly and spoke more softly when they came within the circle of the open lawn. It seemed very breathless and silent in the late afternoon sunlight, this beautiful place with its black, motionless pine trees, its gleaming pool and its empty, ruined house open to the sky.
“I wish I understood about all this,” said Betsey, almost under her breath as they stood a moment by the still pool, “why the house was never rebuilt, why Miss Miranda works so hard and looks so worried and so sad.”
“There’s something strange about the place,” David agreed, “and Miss Miranda and her father are not like other people. Sometimes she seems to me like a person who sees a great trouble coming nearer and nearer and doesn’t know what to do.”
“I wish,” Betsey said with a deep wistful sigh, “oh, how I wish we could help her!”