She turned toward the boy with outstretched hands and he caught and held them for a moment. Then she was off, running as fast as she could to serve the people into whose house she had gone with the motives of a spy.
CHAPTER X
SAM
Of course Annie Laurie told Azalea and Carin all about it as the three sat together the next day after luncheon, in the schoolroom.
“Papa said he’d seen you,” Carin answered. “He was horseback riding and late getting home, and he said he saw you out with the Disbrows, and that Mrs. Disbrow looked like a ghost that had got back to earth and didn’t like it very well. But he thought you were wonderful to do that. He didn’t quite see how you could, feeling as you do, but he thought it lovely of you just the same!”
“Well,” said Annie Laurie. “You see I didn’t feel quite the way I thought I did when I saw that poor woman and Hannah; and then poor Sam looked at me as if he thought I could set his world right if I only would.”
“It’s a terribly twisted world,” mused Azalea. “Now, what if poor little Hannah has her eyes straightened, and Sam goes to college, and Mrs. Disbrow gets her health out West all out of the money that was stolen from you, Annie Laurie? Those are all good things to have happen.”
“Yes, they are,” answered Annie Laurie without anger. “They are good things. But you remember what Elder Mills said that last night about avoiding lies in word and act. I remember particularly because it was something like what the preacher had been saying over to the Baptist church only a few Sundays before. It seemed to me they were all harping on that subject, but I begin to see why, now. I can see that all false things are lies—that stealing is a sort of lie—a saying that something is yours which isn’t. It will be like that with the Disbrows, I suppose; no matter what good comes to them, it won’t seem good—at least not to Mr. Disbrow, who knows the truth about how he came by the money. It’s dreadful, when you come to think of it, that a nice boy like Sam should be having things out of that money he’s no right to.”
“You oughtn’t to speak as if it was an absolutely sure thing that he took the money, Annie Laurie,” warned Carin. “Papa says we mustn’t do that. He says it’s a kind of crime in itself to accuse people of sins when you’re not sure they’re guilty.”
“I’ll try not to,” sighed Annie Laurie penitently, “but it’s very hard. And, oh, Carin, it’s getting to be so sad at the house with the old aunts always talking about the lost money and hunting and hunting for it, and the business going to pieces and I not able to prevent it.”
That night when the Carsons sat at dinner, Carin told her father that Annie Laurie had said Mrs. Disbrow was expecting her husband to take the family West.