When the girls stopped laughing—and Sally had finished the cookie—Nell added:
“Aunt Freda came last night to dinner and we had strawberry fool. Cook makes a delicious one. And Sally could eat her weight of that delicacy. When I came to serve the dessert Sally was watching me with her eagle eye and her mouth watering. I spooned out an ordinary dishful, and Sally whispered:
“‘Oh, sister! is that all I get?’
“So I told her it was for Aunt Freda, and she gasped:
“‘What! All that?’”
The boys got the thing they wanted soldered completed about this time, and Bob ran down the back way with the fire-pot. The rain began to lift. As Nell cheerfully said, a patch of blue sky soon appeared in the west big enough to make a Scotchman a kilt, so they could be sure that it would clear.
Jessie and Amy walked home after seeing the Stanley boys’ radio set completed. Their minds then naturally reverted to the adventures of the morning and what they had heard so mysteriously out of the ether the evening before. Jessie had warned her chum to say nothing to anybody about the mysterious prisoner and the stock farm over by Harrimay or of their suspicions until she had talked again with Mr. Norwood.
Momsy came home that afternoon from Aunt Ann’s, but Mr. Norwood did not appear. The Court was sitting, and he had several cases which needed his entire attention. He often remained away from home several days in succession at such times.
“And one of the most important cases is that one he told us about,” Momsy explained. “He is greatly worried about that. If he cannot find that girl who lived with Mrs. Poole——”
“Oh, Momsy!” exclaimed Jessie, “let us find Daddy and tell him about what Amy and I heard over the radio. I believe we learned something about Bertha Blair, only we could not find her this morning.”