“Where are you going?”
“I’ve got an errand to do,” said Laura, evasively, and darted into the house.
She ran up to her room, seized something from a bureau drawer, stuffed it behind the bib of her big apron, and ran down the front stairway and out of the house by that door.
The Grimes’s car was still waiting. Mrs. Grimes—a much overdressed woman with the same natural bloom on her coarse face that Hester possessed—was just coming out of the house.
Laura darted down the walk out at the gate. She flew up the street and reached the automobile before Mrs. Grimes had stepped in. That lady was saying to her daughter:
“Hester! I ’most know you took that veil and lost it. You took it the night you went car-riding alone. You remember? When you said you had been as far as Robinson’s picnic grounds——”
“Oh, Mrs. Grimes!” gasped Laura, “is this your veil?”
She flashed before the eyes of Hester and her mother the veil that had been used to gag her when she was overcome by the “ghost” in the haunted house in Robinson’s Woods.
“No! That isn’t her veil,” declared Hester, quickly, but growing redder in the face than Nature, even, had intended her to be. “She never saw that veil before.”
“Why, hold on, child!” exclaimed Mrs. Grimes. “That looks like mine.”