"Here comes that tiresome Thurston girl, whom you were going to use as your tool, Peter," teased Mrs. Wilson. "She wasn't so easy to manage as you thought, was she? Never mind; she will still be used as our scapegoat. But I shall not see her this morning. What's the use?"
"Let her come in, by all means, Mrs. Wilson," Peter Dillon urged. "I shall hide so that she will not see me. What would fall in with our plans better than to have this girl come here to-day! Who knows how this visit may be made to count against her? Of course, if suspicion never points to us we had best never mention the name of Barbara Thurston. But—if Mr. Hamlin ever questions you, why not say Miss Thurston came here to-day and betrayed the fact to you that she had stolen Mr. Hamlin's papers? We have circumstantial evidence enough against her."
Bab found Mrs. Wilson very much surprised to see her, and looking very languid and bored.
Straightforward Barbara rushed headlong into her request.
"Really, Miss Thurston, don't you think you are rather impertinent?" drawled her hostess, when Bab finished. "I don't see what business it is of yours whether or not I wish to play a joke on my friend, Mr. Hamlin. Don't try to get out of mischief by reporting to Mr. Hamlin the story of my poor little joke. You can hardly save yourself by any such method. No one will believe you. And I have an idea that you came to my house to-day for a very different purpose than to persuade me to give up my joke. What was it?"
Bab was mystified. She had no idea how Mrs. Wilson and Peter Dillon had planned to use her visit as evidence against her, so it was impossible for her to understand Mrs. Wilson's insinuation.
Barbara did not stay long. She saw Mrs. Wilson had no intention of being persuaded from her design. Even though the woman was beginning to see that Bab and Ruth were a little suspicious of her, she had no idea of being frightened from her deep-laid scheme by two insignificant schoolgirls.
Barbara hurried to her car as fast as she could, anxious to get back to Ruth and to devise some other move to checkmate the traitors. She even hoped, against hope, that Harriet had been induced to change her mind and that all would yet be well. But as Bab jumped aboard her car she saw another girl, running down the street, waving something in the air and evidently trying to induce Bab's street car to wait for her. Barbara begged the conductor to hold the car for a moment, before she recognized the figure, running toward them. But the next second she beheld the ever-present newspaper girl, Marjorie Moore, tablet and pencil in hand, completely out of breath and exhausted. Marjorie Moore could not speak for some time after she had secured a seat next Bab in the car.
"I have been watching Mrs. Wilson's house since eight o'clock this morning," she finally gasped. "What on earth made you go in there?"
"I can't tell you," Bab returned coldly. Not for anything in the world would she have Marjorie Moore suspect what she and Ruth feared.