The hostess paid no more heed than if a fly had touched her, but the lad paused in the act of shoveling food into his mouth and stared at Dorothy, as he might have done at the same fly, could it have spoken. Nor did he remove his gaze from her till she had repeated her question. Then he shifted it to the woman's face, who waited awhile longer, then said:
"I tell nothing. Drink your milk."
"Oh, indeed! Then I suppose I must find out for myself. I don't care for the milk, thank you. I rarely drink it at home, but I'm fond of bacon and eggs, and yours look nice. Please serve me some."
The woman made no answer. She had finished her own meal and left the others to do the same. So, as the taciturn creature departed for the open fields, with a hoe over her shoulder, Dorothy drew the platter toward her, found a third empty tin plate, and helped herself.
She had noticed one thing that the others had, apparently, not known she had: a sign of silence interchanged between the woman and the lanky lad. He had been bidden to hold his tongue and been left to clear up the dinner matters. He did this as deftly as a girl, though not after the manner in which Dorothy had been trained: and casting a look of contempt upon him, she finished her dinner, rose, and quietly left the room and the house.
But she got no further than a few rods' distance when she felt a strong hand on her arm, herself turned rudely about, and led back to the cottage. There she was pushed upon the doorstep and a note thrust into her hand by this abnormally silent woman, who had returned from the field as suddenly as if she had sprung from the earth at the girl's very feet.
The note was plainly enough written and to the point:
"Stay quiet where you are and you'll soon be set free. Try to run away and you'll meet big trouble."
There was no signature and the handwriting was unknown: and Dorothy was still blankly gazing at it when it was snatched from her hand, the woman had again disappeared, and a huge mastiff had come around the corner of the cottage, to seat himself upon the doorstep beside her. His attentions might have been friendly; but Dorothy was afraid of dogs, and shrank from this one into the smallest space possible, while there fluttered down over her shoulder the note that had been seized. There was now pinned to it a scrap of paper on which were scrawled three words: