“You can try to laugh if you want to,” snapped Agnes. “But being haunted by a junkman, and getting notes from Gypsies like that! Huh! who wouldn’t be scared? Why, we don’t know what those people might do to us if we give up the bracelet to the wrong person.”
“It doesn’t belong to any of the Gypsies, perhaps.”
“That is exactly it!” she cried. “Maybe, after all, it is the property of Miss Ann Titus’ friend, Sarah.”
“And was lost somewhere on Willow Street—about where your garage now stands—forty years ago!” scoffed Neale. “Well, you are pretty soft, Agnes Kenway.”
This naturally angered the girl, and she pouted and got down from the fence without replying. As she went back up the yard she saw Mrs. Pinkney, with her head tied up with a towel, shaking a dustcloth at one of her front windows. It at least changed the current of the girl’s thought.
“Oh, Mrs. Pinkney!” she cried, running across the street to speak to Sammy’s mother, “have you heard anything?”
“About Sammy? Not a word,” answered the woman. “I have to keep working all the time, Agnes Kenway, or I should go insane. I know I should! I have cleaned this whole house, from attic to cellar, three times since Sammy ran away.”
“Why, Mrs. Pinkney! If you don’t go insane—and I don’t believe you will—I am sure you will overwork and be ill.”
“I must keep doing. I must keep going. If I sit down to think I imagine the most horrible things happening to the dear child. It is awful!”
Agnes knew that never before had the woman been so much disturbed by her boy’s absences from home. It seemed as though she really had lost control of herself, and the Corner House girl was quite worried over Mrs. Pinkney.