Margaret smiled.
“Nothing, Patty. I only meant that they hadn’t lived in Mrs. Whalen’s kitchen and kept all their wealth in a tin cup.”
“No, they hain’t,” said Patty, her eyes on the sparkle of a diamond on the plump white finger of a woman near by.
Margaret and Patty lost no time the next morning in beginning their search for the twins. There was very little, after all, that Patty knew of her sisters since she had last seen them; but that little was treasured and analyzed and carefully weighed. The twins were at the Whalens’ when last heard from. The Whalens, therefore, must be the first ones to be looked up; and to the Whalens—as represented by the address in Clarabella’s last letter—the searchers proposed immediately to go.
“An’ ter think that you was bein’ looked fur jest like this once,” remarked Patty, as they turned the corner of a narrow, dingy street.
“Poor dear mother! how she must have suffered,” murmured Margaret, her eyes shrinking from the squalor and misery all about them. “I think perhaps never until now did I realize it—quite,” she added softly, her eyes moist with tears.
“Ye see the Whalens ain’t whar they was when you left ’em in that nice place you got fur ’em,” began Patty, after a moment, consulting the paper in her hand. “They couldn’t keep that, ‘course; but Clarabella wrote they wa’n’t more’n one or two blocks from the Alley.”
“The Alley! Oh, how I should love to see the Alley!” cried Margaret. “And we will, Patty; we’ll go there surely before we return home. But first we’ll find the Whalens and the twins.”
The Whalens and the twins, however, did not prove to be so easily found. They certainly were not at the address given in Clarabella’s letter. The place was occupied by strangers—people who had never heard the name of Whalen. It took two days of time and innumerable questions to find anybody in the neighborhood, in fact, who had heard the name of Whalen; but at last patience and diligence were rewarded, and early on the third morning Margaret and Patty started out to follow up a clew given them by a woman who had known the Whalens and who remembered them well.
Even this, however, promising as it was, did not lead to immediate success, and it was not until the afternoon of the fifth day that Margaret and Patty toiled up four flights of stairs and found a little bent old woman sitting in a green satin-damask chair that neither Margaret nor Patty could fail to recognize.