“Throw them away!” Mr. Chase slammed the book shut, tossed it aside and seized Willard’s cap from the couch. “Put this on,” he exclaimed, “and scoot home! Find those envelopes and bring them over here! If your mother has thrown them away you’re out sixty or seventy dollars at least!”
“Where are those envelopes, mother?” asked Willard five minutes later, bursting into the kitchen where Mrs. Morris was in the act of sliding a pan of hot biscuits from the oven. The pan almost fell to the floor and Mrs. Morris straightened up to remonstrate against “scaring a body to death,” but the words died away when she saw Willard’s face.
“What envelopes do you mean, Will?” she gasped.
“The ones Grandma Pierson sent! Mr. Chase says those stamps may be worth seventy dollars!”
“Sakes alive, Willard Morris! You don’t mean it? Why—why—what did I do with them? Haven’t you seen them around?”
“No, I haven’t seen them since the day they came. Don’t you know what you did with them, mother?”
“Why—why,” faltered Mrs. Morris, “it doesn’t seem as if I did anything with them, Will! I don’t recollect seeing them after you and your father went off. Will, you don’t suppose”—her voice became scarcely more than a whisper—“you don’t suppose I threw them away, do you?”
“You wouldn’t be likely to, would you?” he asked anxiously. “Won’t you please try and think?”
“I am trying, Will, but—but I can’t remember seeing them again.” She hurried to the dining-room, which was also the sitting-room, and began a feverish search. Willard followed behind her and looked wherever she did, and in two minutes the room had the appearance of having been devastated by a cyclone. And in the midst of the confusion Mr. Morris entered. Being excitedly informed of what was going on, he, too, took a hand in the hunt. But ten minutes later they all had to acknowledge that the envelopes were not in the room.