She turned the hat upside down and looked carefully at the lining.
"Let me take it into the house and brush some of the dust off it," interposed Sally hastily, fearing every moment that the hidden names would be revealed, under her mother's inquisitive scrutiny.
"No! no! let it be, just as it is," said the Squire, perchance put on the alert by Sally's manner, and suspicious of her ill-concealed desire to get the hat in her possession.
"Look here! what's this on the underside of the lining of this band?" asked Mrs. Brown, as she ran her fingers around the inside of the crown, and pulled down the lining. "It looks like writing, only it's red," she added, squinting her eyes after the manner of one whose vision has begun to fail.
At that moment Sally felt as though she fairly hated her mother's prying nature.
"What is it, Sally?" asked her mother; "your eyes are younger than mine."
The girl, after a careless glance, but with a sickening sense of fear taking possession of her as she recognized the arrow-pierced heart and the two names written underneath, answered in as calm and collected voice as she could command, "It looks like streaks of blood."
She partly averted her face as she spoke, for she felt that her mother or the Squire would read in her very eyes the secret she was striving to hide. There was no longer a doubt of the hat's ownership. It was Milton's Derr's beyond all questioning, and the discovery of his name and hers written therein was now but a matter of brief delay, as the Squire's next words seemed to indicate.
"I'll have it closely examined when I get to town. It will not be a hard matter to locate its owner, I think."
"Would you mind giving me a seat to town?" asked the girl suddenly, beset with a new resolve.