“We must find some way to help them,” Vi was beginning when Mrs. Haddon herself came into the room.
She seemed to be sorry for what she had said, and she told them so. She drew up the only chair that was left in the bare little room and sat down, facing the chums.
“You must have thought it very strange for me to speak as I did,” she began, and went on hurriedly as the girls seemed about to protest. “But I have had so much trouble for years that sometimes I don’t know just what I’m doing.”
“Have you lived alone here for very long?” asked Billie, gently.
“Ever since my husband died,” answered Polly Haddon, leaning back in her chair as though she were tired and smoothing her heavy hair back from her forehead. “He was an inventor,” she went on, encouraged by the girls’ friendly interest, to tell of her troubles. “For years he made hardly enough to keep us alive, and after the children came we had a harder pull of it than ever. Then suddenly,” she straightened up in her chair and into her black eyes came a strange gleam, “suddenly, my husband found the one little thing that was wrong with the invention he had been working on for so long—just some little thing it was, that a child could almost see, yet that he had overlooked—and we were fairly crazy with happiness. We thought we had at last realized our dream of a fortune.”
She paused a moment, evidently living over that time in her mind, and the girls, fired by her excitement, waited impatiently for her to go on.
“What happened then?” asked Vi.
“Then,” said the woman, the light dying out of her eyes, leaving them tired and listless again, “the invention was stolen.”
“Stolen!” they echoed, breathlessly.
The woman nodded wearily. She had evidently lost all interest in her story.