"Why, yes I am helping you," said Janice warmly. "At least, I am trying to. If you will invite Amy with the rest of us girls, I'll see that she has a party dress. I should think that was helping you a whole lot, Stella Latham. You said you didn't want to hurt her feelings."
The car reached the schoolhouse. Janice was out of it like a flash with her schoolbooks and lunch. The bell was tolling.
"Now, isn't that just like Janice Day?" grumbled Stella, following her from the automobile. "She is a sly little thing!"
Mr. Broxton Day felt much more troubled than Janice possibly could feel about the disappearance of the treasure-box and the keepsakes it contained. Intrinsically, the value of the articles that she named was not very great, although nothing could replace the diary or the miniature of his dead wife. But as he had intimated to Janice over the telephone there was something else. There was that lost with the so-called treasure-box that meant more to him than the mementoes his daughter had known about.
During this lonely year that had passed since his wife's death, Mr. Day's experiences with domestic help had been disheartening as well as varied.
Olga Cedarstrom had been with them two months. She had come rather better recommended than some of her predecessors. Instead of obtaining her services through an agency, Mr. Day had found her in "Pickletown," as the hamlet at the pickle works was called.
There Olga, recently arrived in Greensboro, had been living with friends. Mr. Day went over there first of all to search for the girl.
But her whilom friends knew nothing about Olga since the previous evening. They did not know that she contemplated leaving Mr. Day. And she had not appeared at Pickletown after she had departed from eight hundred and forty-five Knight Street that morning.
Mr. Day did not wish to put the police on the trail of the absent
Olga. In the first place there was no real evidence that the
Swedish girl had stolen the box of mementoes.
If she had taken them at all, she must have done so just to pique Janice, not understanding how really valuable the contents of the box were. If possible, Mr. Day wished to recover the lost box without the publicity of going to the police, both for Olga's sake and for his own.