“If we were only rich!” Ruth rejoined.
“My goodness! and wouldn’t we be rich—just!—if all that stage money I found was only real, Ruthie?” Agnes whispered to her elder sister.
Ruth grew very red and said, quite tartly for her: “I don’t see that it would do us any good—if it were so. You let it go out of your hands very easily.”
“Oh, pshaw! Neale will bring it back,” said Agnes, half laughing, yet wondering that Ruth should be so earnest. “You speak just as though you believed it was good money.”
“You don’t know, one way or another, whether it is so or not.”
“Why, Ruth!”
“Well, you don’t, do you?” demanded the elder sister.
“How silly you talk. You’re as bad as Neale about those old bonds. I believe he lugged that book off with him just to show somebody the bonds to see if they were any good.”
Ruth turned away, and said nothing more regarding the album; but Agnes was more and more puzzled about the whole affair. The two girls were not confiding in each other. Nothing, of course, could have shaken Agnes’ belief in Neale’s honesty. While, on the other hand, Ruth feared that the ex-circus-boy had fallen before temptation.
Believing, as she did, that the banknotes found in the album were all good, the oldest Corner House girl considered that the bonds might be of great value, too. Altogether, as Neale had figured up, there was over a hundred thousand dollars in the album.