The next moment she turned an astonished face to her sister. “Barbara!” she exclaimed, “it isn’t here, anywhere!” Indeed, the marble top of the little table was absolutely bare. There was no sign of either of the gold pieces.
“Let’s look on the floor,” said Barbara, quietly. “One of our guests may have unconsciously brushed them off.”
Both girls stopped and began a careful survey of the carpeted floor, under the table, and near the window. Their search was unrewarded.
“Let’s look in the grass outside,” suggested Mollie. “You might have brushed them off as you went through the window.”
“But didn’t you say you saw them on the table, when you came back into the room and found me gone?” queried Barbara, thoughtfully.
“I was sure I did,” Mollie replied. “But sometimes one remembers imaginary things. And if the money had been in the room when I came in, it would be there now. I’ll ask mother——”
“No, don’t,” said Barbara quickly; “at least, not yet.” Mrs. Thurston had gone into the kitchen directly after her return from the gate, and had heard none of the conversation. “There’s no need to worry mother about it now. Of course we must find it somewhere. Money doesn’t walk off by itself. We’ll go out and look in the grass under the window.”
On hands and knees the girls worked through the closely cropped grass underneath the sitting room window. Not two days before, they themselves had clipped this bit of lawn with big shears, and it was so close that there seemed no possibility of anything being hidden in it. Certainly nothing was to be found. The girls even looked over the short path, and ground near it. “Your skirts might have switched those small things a long way,” observed Mollie, wisely. Yet, as before, the result was—nothing.
Giving it up, at last, the girls sat down in a little garden seat at one side of the tiny yard, and looked at each other ruefully.
“I am so glad I feel sure Miss Stuart will invite us to her party, now,” commented Mollie dryly. “Our new gowns and the pink hair ribbons and the silk stockings will be so awfully fetching! But where, where, where, by all that’s mysterious, can those double-eagles have flown?”