"Do you know anything about my little sister?" asked William. "They said she had come over here."
"Yes, and she was crying, and she talked to teacher, and they went away, and Ellie and Weezy. They went to town. It was something about a guardian. I heard them talking. But I don't believe they could catch the nine o'clock train. Perhaps they are yet at the station. It is another train at eleven." She finished her sentence in a loud shriek as William, after glancing at his watch, ran down the road. "Come soon to see us, William."
She watched him until he vanished at the turn of the road, then she ran out to the field to tell her husband.
Sarah had often pictured to herself what she would do when William came home. Sometimes she seemed to see him coming up the lane, and herself flying down to meet him. Sometimes he opened the door and came into the kitchen and surprised her. Sometimes she imagined that she would cry; at other times, after she had been reading, for ten or fifteen minutes at a time, "Thaddeus of Warsaw," the one novel which the Wenners possessed, she was sure that she should faint. But in all her imaginings, she never dreamed that she should not know him.
She, too, saw the tall, broad-shouldered young man come into the court-room; she even looked absently straight into his eyes, with her frightened stare. Then she looked away.
"Stealing," Jacob Kalb was saying, "is stealing."
The judge bent forward and spoke to Jacob Kalb. William's character was, after all, not the court's affair. If he had been absent so long in Alaska, where the chances were one to fifty against his life, he was entirely negligible so far as the guardianship of these children was concerned. But the sudden vigor and vindictiveness of Jacob's charge angered the judge. He did not like the man's looks, and he did like Miss Miflin and the quaint little Pennsylvania German girls. He had seen Miss Miflin blush when she mentioned the absent brother.
"Do you mean that this older brother stole?" he asked plainly.
"He took school-board money, and didn't pay it back."