“Oh, Bridget, he’s not a burglar,” she cried. “The money is here all right. Let him out the door. I’m sorry, Mr. Smith,” she added with dignity, “but you certainly acted like a thief, so you mustn’t blame me, since I knew that there was a large amount of money in the desk, for treating you like one.”
“Indade it’s a good whack yez desarve for troublin’ me lovely young ladies,” declared Bridget, reluctantly moving to one side to let her prisoner pass out.
Mr. Smith, scowling angrily, walked across to the desk that had been the cause of all the trouble, and threw down the slip Nora had given him and the change to pay it.
“It’s a pity if a gentleman can’t satisfy his idle curiosity about the date of an antique desk without being taken for a sneak thief,” he declaimed angrily, as he started off.
“It’s a pity when a gintlemin ain’t got enough bisniss of his own to mind so it’ll kape his nose out of other people’s private propity,” cried Bridget after him, and then she turned her attention to comforting Betty, who had been dreadfully frightened by the episode.
“I almost wish the desk was sold,” she declared with a sob in her voice. “It’s always making us trouble with its queer old secret drawers and the people that try to steal out of it—and don’t.”
“It’s a foine desk that burgulars can’t burgle, I’m thinkin’,” Bridget declared consolingly.
“But it attracts burglars,” Betty objected, “and being frightened is almost as bad as being really robbed.”
Madeline, who came that evening, fairly gloated in the mysterious robbery and the strange conduct of Mr. Smith. “It’s like living in a detective story,” she declared. “Mr. Smith was hunting for something, and so were the burglars,—something so valuable that they turned up their noses at six good round dollars. Those old papers can’t be valuable. Therefore it stands to reason that there must be something else in there that we haven’t found—jewels, maybe, worth a king’s ransom. As soon as I’ve embraced dear old 19—, I’ll have another hunt.”
But embracing dear old 19— was a more absorbing process than Madeline had counted it. Class supper night, the grand wind-up of Harding commencement, arrived, and she had not given another thought to the hidden treasure.