The door-knob rattled. "It's me!" said a voice, which sounded very much as if the three caramels were simultaneously occupying one small mouth.
"Run along, Dorothy!" Peggy was too absorbed in the problem confronting her to make her request tactful. She went over to Ruth, who was making a brave struggle to regain her self-control, and possessing herself of the limp hand, stroked it tenderly. Then Peggy's instinct to make excuses for everybody, led her to say, "After all, perhaps we're making a mountain out of a mole-hill."
"Mole-hill!" exclaimed Ruth indignantly. "How you can call it a mole-hill for Graham to take his father's money and pretend it's for things at college when all the time--"
"O, yes, I know. But there's a chance of a mistake," Peggy protested, "I don't suppose you've talked with Graham about it?"
"Goodness, no! I went up to his room this morning to do the work and this letter lay on the floor, not even in the envelope."
"That doesn't look as if he were ashamed of it," Peggy exclaimed triumphantly.
"O, that's Graham all over. No matter what he did, he'd be too careless to cover his tracks. I picked it up and looked at it to see if it was meant to be thrown away or not, and then my eye caught that about the pendant, and I simply couldn't stop. And after I saw what it meant it seemed to me that I should die if I didn't tell somebody."
"But, Ruth," Peggy protested, alarmed, "you surely are going to talk to Graham about it. You can't mean to let it go on, and not give him a chance to explain or anything."
Poor Ruth hid her face in her hands.
"O, Peggy!" she cried in a stifled voice, "if I thought he could explain, I'd be only too glad to give him the chance. But you know yourself he can't. And how can I bear to tell him that I know all about it. If it was anything else, I wouldn't feel so," she added despairingly. "But think, Peggy, of telling your brother that you know he has been cheating your father, and being mean and underhanded, all the time that he talked so beautifully about how grateful he was for what had been done for him, and how hard he was going to try to make us all proud of him."