“Are you sure you left it where they’d see it?”
Maida nodded. “I put a stone on it to hold it down and I surrounded it by other pages that I tore out of my diary and put stones on them. You could not fail to see it.”
Rosie lifted the baby and carried it to her bed. “I don’t think she could fall off,” she said. “But to make sure I’ll put chairs up against her and bank her around with pillows. Now we’d better let her sleep.”
In the meantime, Arthur had finished his telephoning. Mrs. Dore was as well as could be expected; was resting quietly. The break was a simple one. All she needed, in order to recover, was time and rest. The three boys had managed to stop Delia’s sobs; had captured the five other children and were keeping them quiet. Now they bombarded Maida with questions.
For the third time, Maida told the story of the baby. “Well, Maida, you certainly were brave,” Laura declared, “to follow that noise until you found out what it was. I would have run as fast as I could and as far as I could. That is, if I hadn’t fainted.”
“No,” Maida protested, “I wasn’t brave I wish I had been. At first I was as frightened as I could be. But when it flashed on me that it was a baby crying, it didn’t take any courage to find out where the baby was.”
“I wonder whose baby it is,” Harold said.
Everybody said this at least once, everybody except Arthur, but Arthur said nothing. He was thinking hard.
“Something queer happened to me the other night,” he broke out suddenly. “I didn’t tell you all about it because—because—Well somehow I couldn’t. I didn’t know what the answer was and I was ashamed that a girl could beat me like that.”
“Like what?” Rosie demanded. “What are you talking about? Oh, Arthur, do tell us!”