“How do you know she was the real owner?” continued Dorothy.
“You should have seen the dog fly to her,” replied Tavia. “Say, Doro, if you are worried I’ll buy Jake a new pipe, and give it to him for conscience money. But he must never know about Ravelings. What do you suppose his mistress called him? ‘Cyrus,’ because, she told us, he was the sun of her life. Likely she would have died without the sun if I had not restored him to her.”
Dorothy looked troubled. She fully realized what a time there would be when it was found out that the dog was gone.
“Did you advertise it?” she asked, as they now walked back toward the school.
“It’s such a pretty story, Doro, that I want to give it to you whole. Besides,” and Tavia lowered her voice, “echoes have ears.”
CHAPTER XV
THE STORY OF RAVELINGS
“This was how it was,” began Tavia, when, as she said, she and Dorothy were behind closed doors that were locked. “I heard a little lady with glasses on a stick, ask the postman if he had ever heard of a dog. I knew at once it was our dog, because she said she had come all the way from some place, because she fancied her pet had been lost out of her car, in a place on the road near here somewhere. Then I knew the whole story, and I waited until I got her outside. I told her I might be able to find the pup, but the person who had him loved him dearly. Then she fell on my neck, and it was all over. Of course I had to take Ned in on the kidnapping part, to help decide where the money would be left, and where and how the lady would get her Cyrus back. That’s how Ned happened. It all has gone off so splendidly, I feel quite qualified to go into the dog-snatching business,” and Tavia helped herself to one of Dorothy’s wafers.
“But Jake will surely find it out,” Dorothy insisted, “besides, it seems a shame to have him posting notices all over, when——”
“The best thing that ever happened to Jake,” interrupted Tavia. “I have heard it is the first time in ten years that he tried to write his name.”