“The Lord will reward you, Judge,” said Berty, heartily.
“I take no credit to myself, not a particle,” said the Judge. “I come in contact with him but little. He regards Titus as his special oppressor. Look up there, Mrs. Everest.”
Berty raised her eyes. The Judge was standing in the open door of the stable pointing toward the house. “Can you see two little gray balls of down up at the top of that old elm?”
“No, sir, I can’t.”
“Look again—just where the topmost branches extend under the gutter at the roof’s edge.”
“O, yes, I do see something—those are surely not Dallas’s little owls that Bethany told me about the other day?”
“Yes, they sit there asleep all day. At night they fly about. What did Bethany tell you about them?”
“After I rescued her from those women she seemed greatly relieved, and confided to me a slight misgiving she had had. Suppose they had taken her to New York, and had not been able to find Daddy Grandpa. ‘I tell you, Mrs. Everest, what Bethany would do,’ she said, sweetly, to me. ‘Bethany would open her window at night and call ’Frisco and ’Mento, Dallas’s two little owls that fly in the dark, and she would say, “Go home quickly and tell Daddy Grandpa that Bethany wants him.”’”
The Judge was listening intently. “How curious is the working of a child’s mind!” he said. “In that statement she confesses a belief that I was here all the time, that I had not gone to New York. She must have had an intuitive distrust of those women.”
“I believe she had,” said Berty, decidedly. “It was just her sweet, yielding nature that made her go with them.”