Miss Jane’s secret was not so hard to discover as was the secret of the Little Room.
‘I would like to talk with Hiram,’ said Nan.
‘Oh, Hiram he’ll talk till doomsday, once set him goin’, and say pretty smart things too, for a man.’
‘Hiram, can’t you tell us something about the old house?’ asked Nan the next morning, as Hiram rose from the kitchen table where he had been taking the solace of a corner-piece of Jane’s huckleberry pie.
‘That depends,’ said Hiram, ‘upon what you want to know. I s’pose I can tell as much as anybody.’
‘What we really want to know,’ said Rita, candidly, ‘is whether there was a closet or a little room on the north side of the Keys house, between the front and the back rooms.’
Hiram rubbed his ear carefully and began in a judicial way:
‘When Jonathan Keys first built that house, some time way back in 1700, he planned to have—’
‘Jane Peebles! Jane Peebles! you’re wanted right off, up to the Fifes’, and Hiram too; Hannah she’s took worse, and Maria she’s no more use than a babe unborn. I’m on my way up there now,’ concluded the Widder Luke, as she hurried up the hill.
When Rita and Nan went to say good-bye to Maria, a few days later, Maria clung to them. She had begun to like these new friends who had taken it upon themselves to try and do for her what Mrs. Grant would have done had she been there. She followed them to the door, and said, in a whisper: