“Oh, and there must have been more money,” broke in Annie Laurie, “much, much more! I know papa always had a lot, Mr. Carson, but I haven’t an idea where he kept it. None of us had. If we ever asked him for money he would go away for a time and presently come back with the bills he meant to give us. He had some place where he hid it, and I used to think he ought to tell some one of us where it was.”
“I should think so, indeed,” said Mr. Carson rather heatedly. “Then you haven’t any of you a notion where he kept his funds?”
“Not an earthly idea!” cried Annie Laurie.
“We haven’t the faintest notion, sir,” said Miss Adnah. “I will confess now that sister and I got up in the night—last night it was—and looked everywhere in his room. We even lifted the edges of the carpet and took the back off the steel engravings. We looked, of course, in the bureau, and the chest and the closet. We found nothing. It was our intention to begin to-night searching in the other rooms of the house.”
“But why in the night, ladies?”
Miss Adnah looked rather offended, as if Mr. Carson had gone a little too far in asking such questions. But Miss Zillah broke out with:
“Oh, you see, sir, it seemed so silly and absurd for us to have to do a thing like that. My opinion is that brother Simeon should have kept up with the times and used a bank like other men. I hate to have the neighbors know what trouble and embarrassment he has put us to.”
Miss Adnah looked at her sister in amazement. She, who was so gentle of judgment and of speech, was actually criticising a Pace—and her own dead brother at that! But Mr. Carson turned a look of appreciation on the flushed little face of the old lady.
“The Paces are not all cranks, anyway,” was his thought. “This Miss Zillah seems a very sensible sort of a woman—quite fit to be related to Annie Laurie.”
The reflection would have surprised Miss Adnah very much had she known of it, for she regarded herself as a person of singular good sense. Indeed, she secretly thought that she had, so far as the Paces were concerned, rather a monopoly of it. Zillah she regarded as something of a dreamer, too sentimental, or “soft,” as she put it, by half; and she felt very disapproving when she heard her pass uncomplimentary judgment upon one of the family. That was a privilege which Miss Adnah reserved for herself.