David remembered now, suddenly, that his father had said to hide them—to hide them until he needed them. David was relieved at once. Why had he not thought of it before? He knew just the place, too,—the little cupboard behind the chimney there in this very room! And with a satisfied sigh, David got to his feet, gathered all the little yellow disks from his pockets, and tucked them well out of sight behind the piles of books on the cupboard shelves. There, too, he hid the watch; but the little miniature of the angel-mother he slipped back into one of his pockets.
David's second morning at the farmhouse was not unlike the first, except that this time, when Simeon Holly asked him to fill the woodbox, David resolutely ignored every enticing bug and butterfly, and kept rigorously to the task before him until it was done.
He was in the kitchen when, just before dinner, Perry Larson came into the room with a worried frown on his face.
"Mis' Holly, would ye mind just steppin' to the side door? There's a woman an' a little boy there, an' somethin' ails 'em. She can't talk English, an' I'm blest if I can make head nor tail out of the lingo she DOES talk. But maybe you can."
"Why, Perry, I don't know—" began Mrs. Holly. But she turned at once toward the door.
On the porch steps stood a very pretty, but frightened-looking young woman with a boy perhaps ten years old at her side. Upon catching sight of Mrs. Holly she burst into a torrent of unintelligible words, supplemented by numerous and vehement gestures.
Mrs. Holly shrank back, and cast appealing eyes toward her husband who at that moment had come across the yard from the barn.
"Simeon, can you tell what she wants?"
At sight of the newcomer on the scene, the strange woman began again, with even more volubility.
"No," said Simeon Holly, after a moment's scowling scrutiny of the gesticulating woman. "She's talking French, I think. And she wants—something."