The two girls by this time had left Main Street and turned into Putnam Square.
"Grace," said Eleanor suddenly. "I believe I can guess the place you are headed for. You are going to Henry Hammond's office, aren't you?"
"Yes," said Grace, surprised at the accuracy of Eleanor's guess, "I am."
"And you are going there about the money that he stole from Marian. Am I right!"
"You are," answered Grace truthfully. "But how did you know?"
"Because," said Eleanor quietly, "I intended going there myself."
"Then you think that——" began Grace.
"I think that Henry Hammond is a thief and an impostor," finished Eleanor. "He tried to interest Aunt Margaret in some real estate, and called at 'Heartsease' on two different occasions. She is a very shrewd business woman and he couldn't fool her in the least. Both times he called he kept looking about him all the time, as though he were trying to see whether we had any valuables. He raved over the house, and hinted to be shown through it, but we weren't so foolish.
"When Chief Burroughs was questioning the prisoner to-day about his confederate, it suddenly flashed across me that it might be this man Hammond. He appeared here for the first time on the night of the bazaar and—"
"Eleanor," exclaimed Grace, "you've missed your vocation. You should have been a detective. I believe what you say to be the truth and have thought so for some time. We can hardly denounce Henry Hammond upon suspicion, but we can scare him and make him give back the class money. Perhaps we are defeating the ends of justice by not telling what we suspect, but if we have him arrested on suspicion, then the only way we can get back our money is to publicly charge him with extorting it from Marian. Think what a disgrace that would be for her in her graduating year, too," Grace added. "She would feel too ashamed to ever again face her best friends."