"Don't mention it! And good day!"
The slamming of the inner door behind him made an appropriate exclamation point to punctuate the brevity of his offended and indignant departure. For a moment she felt like laughing outright. Then she felt like crying. Then she did neither. She left.
"Poor, old opinionated, stupid old, conscientious old thing!" she was saying to herself as she let herself, unattended, out of the front door. "And yet I'll wager he would sit up all night and work his fingers to the bone trying to save a life. And when it comes to serving poor people without expecting payment or even asking for it, I know he is a perfect dear. Besides, I should be grateful to him—he gave me an idea. I don't know where he got it from either—I don't believe he ever had so very many of his own."
Again the handy cop in the communal center set her upon her way. But when she came to the destination she sought—a small, rather shabby cottage standing a mile or so westward from the middle of things communal, out in the fringes of the village where outlying homesteads tailed away into avowed farmsteads—the house itself was closed up fast and tight. The shutters all were closely drawn and against the gatepost was fastened a newly painted sign reading: "For Sale or Rent. Apply to Searle, the Up-to-Date Real Estate Man, Next Door to Pythian Hall."
Not quite sure she had stopped at the right place, Miss Smith hailed a man pottering in a chrysanthemum bed in the yard of the adjoining cottage.
"Mrs. Vinsolving?" he said, lifting a tousled head above his palings. "Yessum, she lives there—leastwise she did. She moved away only the day before yesterday. Sort of sudden, I think it must have been. I didn't know she was going till she was gone." He grinned in extenuation of the unaccountable failure of a small-town man to acquaint himself with all available facts regarding a neighbor's private affairs. "But then she never wasn't much of a hand, Mrs. Vinsolving wasn't, for mixing with folks. I'll say she wasn't!"
Back she turned to seek out Searle, he of up-to-date real estate. In a dingy office upstairs over the local harness store a lean and rangy gentleman raised a brindled beard above a roll-top desk and in answer to her first question crisply remarked, "Can't tell."
"But surely if she put her property in your hands for disposal she must have given you some address where you might communicate with her?" pressed Miss Smith.
"Oh, yes, she done that all right, but that ain't the question you ast me first. You ast me if I could tell you where she was—and that I can't do."
"I see. Then I presume she left instructions with you not to give her present whereabouts to anyone?"