Jewel's beautiful dark face dilated with anger as she muttered to herself:
"The obstinate little vixen, how I hate her! I do not know why I do not tell mamma everything. It is only because I am afraid she would not be severe enough upon her. I will wait, wait, until I get more to go upon. That wretched Sam, where can he have gone, and why does he not return?"
For Sam had locked up the cabin on the morning after Laurie Meredith disappeared, and had gone away, no one knew where.
Perhaps he had gone to get rid of the importunities of Mrs. Fielding, fearing lest in some weak moment she might cajole him out of the papers she desired so much.
However that may be, he had disappeared as entirely as if mother earth had opened and swallowed him, and both Mrs. Fielding and Jewel chafed bitterly over this misfortune.
Mrs. Fielding had gone to Sam's house several times in the dead of night and made eager search for the papers, but without success. But the known fact that Sam was gone away, connected with the fact that lights had been seen flaring through the cabin windows at night, speedily gave room to gossips about the neighborhood to declare that old Maria's ghost haunted the place.
When the report came to the ears of Mrs. Fielding she smiled bitterly, and Jewel, who had been watching her mother's face, immediately leaped to a conclusion. She thought:
"She has been there searching for those papers at night."
And she immediately determined that she would do the same thing, for she felt convinced that her mother had failed. Else why did she grow older and stranger with such awful rapidity that her daughters shuddered sometimes, fearing from her fits of rage alternating with fearful moodiness that she was going mad.
Poor Flower, in spite of her own sorrows, felt an added pang when she heard that the ghost of her old black nurse was walking about her old home. She shed some bitter tears, and ventured to express a timid fear lest Maria had had something on her mind before she died which made her spirit restless now.