But this “bound boy” had worked, studied nights so as to get some education, had married his master’s daughter, and come in time to be heir to his business. He had taken contracts for furnishing the ironwork for government warships, and so, little by little, had risen to be a prosperous, then a very wealthy man.
The old Corner House was the fruit of his labor and his desire to establish in the town of his miserable beginnings, a monument to his own pluck and endeavor. Where he may have been scorned for the “bound boy” that he was, he took pride in leaving behind him when he died the memory only of a strong, rich, proud man.
The girls found nothing which the last Peter Stower could have considered—whether he were miser, or not—of sufficient value to hide away. Certainly no recently dated papers came to light, and no will at all, or anything that looked like such a document.
They ransacked every drawer, taking them out of the worm-eaten, shaky pieces of furniture, and rummaging behind them for secret panels and the like. Actually, the only thing the girls found that mystified them at all in their search, was half a doughnut lying on a window sill!
“Whoever left that doughnut there?” demanded Agnes. “I don’t believe the girls have been up here alone. Could that Lillie have been here?”
“Perhaps,” sighed Ruth. “She was going everywhere about the house, before she was taken down sick.”
“It’s a blessing she’s sick—that’s what I say,” was Agnes’ rather heartless reply. “But—a doughnut! and all hard and dry.”
“Maybe it was Dot’s goat?” chuckled Ruth, nervously.
“Don’t!” gasped Agnes. “My nerves are all on the jump as it is. Is there any single place in this whole garret that we haven’t looked?”
Ruth chanced to be staring at the doughnut on the window sill, and did not at first answer. That was the window at the right of the chimney where she had seen the ghostly apparition fluttering in the storm. The space about the window remained cleared, as it was before.