“Ruthie didn’t say so,” complained Dot. “Did she, Tess?”
“But I guess we’d better mind what Agnes says when Ruth isn’t at home,” confessed Tess, more amenable to discipline. “You know, Aggie has got to be responsible now.”
“Well,” muttered the rebellious Dot, “never mind if she is ‘sponserble, she needn’t be so awful bossy about it!”
Agnes did, of course, feel her importance while Ruth was away. It was not often that she was made responsible for the family welfare in any particular. And just now the matter of the silver bracelet loomed big on her horizon.
She scarcely expected the advertisement in the Morning Post to bring immediate results. Yet, it might. The Gypsies’ gift to the little girls was a very queer matter indeed. The suggestion that the bracelet had been stolen by the Romany folk did not seem at all improbable.
And if this was so, whoever had lost the ornament would naturally be watching the “Lost and Found” column in the newspaper.
“Unless the owner doesn’t know he has lost it,” Agnes suggested to Neale.
“How’s that? He’d have to be more absent-minded than Professor Ware not to miss a bracelet like that,” scoffed her boy chum.
“Oh, Professor Ware!” giggled Agnes, suddenly. “He would forget anything, I do believe. Do you know what happened at his house the other evening when the Millers and Mr. and Mrs. Crandall went to call?”
“The poor professor made a bad break I suppose,” grinned Neale. “What did he do?”