Adelaide and Milly looked at each other significantly, and Milly exclaimed:
“You dear, generous thing! Why didn’t you tell us that you meant to do anything so lovely? Adelaide and I would have helped.”
Winnie did not reply to Milly, but answered my thanks with a close hug.
“Come,” said Milly, “and put your money in the safe, and see how much you have now toward the fund.”
“Oh! That’s easy to calculate,” I replied, as I slipped on my clothing, “twenty and forty-seven—sixty-seven dollars exactly.”
Adelaide coughed significantly. “Tib seems to be very confident that two and two makes four,” she remarked. A suspicion that both Adelaide and Milly intended to help me suggested itself to my mind, and I hastened my dressing and unlocked the safe. As I did so Cynthia opened her door. “Oh! it’s you,” she exclaimed; “whenever I hear any one at the safe I always look to see who it is.”
She did not retreat into her room, but stood in the door watching us with a singular expression on her disagreeable face. Adelaide and Milly were looking over my shoulder. Milly apparently vainly endeavoring to conceal a little flutter of excitement. We were all there but Winnie, who had not left her seat at the window, when I threw open the door of the safe and disclosed—nothing!
The space on the floor where I usually kept my money, where the night before I had placed a long blue envelope containing forty-seven dollars—was empty. The envelope and its contents gone.
Milly uttered a little shriek. Adelaide stepped forward and examined the space, passing her hand far in, and feeling carefully in every corner. Then she took out her own roll of bills from her little pigeon-hole. I counted them with her, just fifty dollars less than the sum which I saw her place there. She handed me a five dollar bill, saying, “Tib, my dear, my only disappointment is that I cannot give you as large a birthday present as I had planned.”
Milly threw her arms around me, “And I can’t give you anything, you darling old Tib. I am so sorry.”