"It is not here," said her mother, rising, "but perhaps we shall hear something of it yet. I want you to put on your sun-bonnet and look carefully about the garden. Take an hour, or two hours if necessary, but do it thoroughly. I must go down stairs now to my sewing."
Bessie found it very tedious, sad work searching for her lost treasure that afternoon. She went to each of her favorite haunts, and examined them with great minuteness, but no trace of the nut was to be discovered. One thing seemed to her as very strange, however, and that was, that of all the small supplies of nuts which she had lately carried down to the garden, and of which she did not remember even to have cracked a single one, not so much as a fragment of a shell was now to be found. Only the day before she had left a little strawberry basket half filled, on the big stone by the brook, to which the reader remembers she once led Mr. Dart to survey the cresses. She had meant to sit there and crack and pick them out at once, at her leisure, but something attracting her attention as usual, she did not do so, but deserted both basket and nuts. The basket was there still, but to her surprise, it was quite empty. It lay on its side near where she had left it. No mark of any one having been there was to be seen in the muddy grass.
Bessie took up the basket and gazed at it in silent astonishment. What could it mean? Who would help themselves to her nuts in this way? and why was the basket not carried off also? She was still sitting on the stone thinking the whole singular affair over, when she heard Nathan call to her from the next house, where he lived. She looked up, and there he was leaning over the fence. She had just been thinking of him, and it made her feel unpleasantly to see him.
"Bess," cried he, "what do you think? father is going to give me a ride to town to-morrow."
Bessie scarcely heard him as she rose, and holding up her empty basket, said reproachfully,—
"Oh, Nathan, how could you climb over the fence and take my nuts?"
"Nuts!" echoed Nathan, "what nuts? I don't know any thing about your nuts."
"Somebody does," said Bessie, "for this basket was half full yesterday, and now it is empty. I left it here on the stone all night."
"I never saw it," said Nathan; "that's mighty pretty of you to accuse a fellow of stealing. You had better be a little careful."