When Agnes reached the dining room again, the circus girl was gone. She tried the key in the lock of the cupboard door. Just as Aunt Sarah Maltby said, it would not turn. Something had fouled the lock.
“I do declare!” thought the troubled and perplexed Agnes. “This is the strangest thing. I never did want to get into this old cupboard before; but I feel now as though I’d just got to.
“There surely is something in it besides Aunt Sarah’s peppermints. Barnabetta told the truth about Aunt Sarah; but she had a personal reason for wanting to open the door, too. I’m certain of that. Dear me! What is this mystery? I want to know.”
She did not see how she could pick the lock of the closet door herself. She knew nothing about such work. Agnes wished Neale were friendly with them so that she could ask him.
And then immediately she was smitten with the thought that Neale O’Neil was another person who seemed curious about what was in the closet.
“Oh, dear me!” murmured Agnes. “What a terrible mix-up this is. What ever shall I do about it?”
Her greatest desire, next to being friends with Neale O’Neil again, was to take Ruth into her confidence about her adventure Saturday night with the mysterious burglar. But because suspicion must point directly to Neale, she could not bring herself to talk it over with her sister.
And Ruth, fearing to take anybody into her confidence regarding the real ownership of the lost treasure, was passing through a sea of troubled waters without even Agnes to confess to. The oldest Corner House girl was, at this very moment, sitting in her room trying to compose a letter to Mr. Howbridge that should reveal the whole story. She supposed the lawyer’s clerk would know how to reach him, for Ruth had forgotten that Tiverton was the name of the town to which Mr. Howbridge had been called by his brother’s illness.
With her pen poised over the page of her letter she wondered how she should word her confession to Mr. Howbridge. For Ruth felt that she, herself, was much to blame for the final loss of the treasure.
Although she blamed Neale to her sister, in her heart Ruth knew that had she been wiser in the first place, all this mystery and difficulty following the odd find in the Corner House garret, would never have arisen.