"I thought she was a very queer woman to keep hunting when she knew it was no use. I came back after breakfast feeling very bad, for it seemed as if Cora had been looking at my hands all the while I was eating. I opened the door of our room, and what do you think? There stood Miss Pike, smiling, and she had both those rings on a knitting-needle, holding them up for me to see.
"'Look at your runaway rings,' said she. I screamed right out, I was so happy.
"It wasn't Lijar, and it wasn't Lena.
"Miss Pike had found them in that room, and you can't guess where.
"She had hunted in that bureau five hundred and sixty times, and taken the things all out. But this time she took out one of the drawers, and sat down on the floor to look it over. It was the next to the upper drawer that she took out, and she happened to look up at the empty place in the bureau where the drawer belonged, and there she saw something shining through a crack. It was those rings, both of them. They had got pushed into the crack and stuck there,—stuck on a splinter.
"Miss Pike said of course I had put them in the upper drawer, instead of the box. It was because I was so sleepy. I don't see how she ever found them, though, and she don't see; for they were sticking to that splinter very tight, and might have stuck there for years and years, if she hadn't happened to sit on the floor and look up, and catch them shining.
"Oh, grandma, I tell you there wasn't a feeling in me that wasn't happy! I went right into Mrs. Garland's room, and laughed right out before I could speak.
"'Here they are, Cora, your runaway rings,' said I. She didn't know what I meant till I told her how terribly they'd been lost. And I said I'd never borrow them any more. I didn't want to be an expensive girl, and my papa such a poor doctor. And Mrs. Garland laughed and said, 'That is right,' only she thought my father wasn't such a very poor doctor.
"I wished Mrs. Garland had said Kittyleen should stop borrowing, too. For Kittyleen—oh, well, I try to be patient with little Kittyleen!
"I met Lena coming out of our room, smiling the pleasantest smile.