“Without a penny?”
“Gimme for nothing.”
“My.”
“I was to have spoke a piece but got afraid.”
“I wouldn’t be ’fraid.”
“Oh, that’s nothing; you’re a girl.”
Here the conference was broken by Johnnie’s offering to show where the ground hogs kept house, and off he and his companion trotted to a remote stone-pile, and did not turn up till supper time, when they burst in upon Mrs Crowdie with the appetite of hawks, and the girl so full of the wonders she had seen that her tongue never rested until she became sleepy. When laid away for the night, Mrs Crowdie sat in the gathering gloom to think over what she should do. The day had passed without any one coming to enquire for a lost girl, which very much surprised her. So far as her own inclinations went, she would rather nobody ever came, but she knew that somewhere a poor mother’s heart was in agony over the loss, and she resolved that, next morning, after breakfast she would drive to Huntingdon to find out if there had been any enquiries.
A SHADE OF MYSTERY.
With many injunctions to Roose, that she was to “be a guid bairn till she got back, an no go near the soos or the wall,” Mrs Crowdie next day betook herself to the village, where she arrived in due course and went first to the office of the president to find out whether he had heard aught. Entering she spied through the net-work that surmounted the counter a man in his shirt-sleeves leaning over a desk writing, with his head turned away from her.