“Now for Nancy,” thought the Captain.
Nancy’s pages came last, as she was the youngest girl of the four. As Captain Richmond read the entries, made first by Miss Roy and then by his sister-in-law, he smiled to himself.
“Well done, Nancy!” he said more than once. “Brave little soldier. I rather gather that you had a tussle with yourself on this day, and that you conquered again on this day. Strange that I should read between the lines! I was not mistaken in my estimate of your character, little Nancy. But, oh! what have we here?”
The Captain was now reading the brief entry made in Mrs. Richmond’s writing on 24th August. He read the few remarks, once in puzzled bewilderment, twice in incredulity, and a third time with the colour mounting to his face and apprehension in his eyes.
“It can’t be true,” he said to himself. “Nancy guilty of cruelty! Impossible.”
He shut the book as if he were thoroughly dissatisfied, and returning it to its drawer, he went up to bed.
CHAPTER XXIII.—“PRIZE-DAY COMES IN A MONTH.”
The next day at breakfast Kitty began to talk of the lost key.
“It is most provoking,” she said. “What shall we do without having our orderly-book properly signed? I cannot find the key anywhere.”
“I have spoken to the servants,” interrupted Nora, “and they have searched mother’s room, and even taken up the rugs and shaken them. I know for a positive fact,” she added, “that neither Kitty nor I took the key from mother’s room.”