"They must be so very poor! Tilly wanted them for her sick mother," she said to herself.
How Tilly could have taken the chickens from the basket and where she could have concealed them was a mystery. But Uncle Reuben believed that all the Coombs family were thievish and sly; perhaps he was right, and Tilly was used to doing such things. But even Uncle Reuben would not be very hard upon a girl who had stolen delicate food for her sick mother.
"'Sh!—'sh! don't say anything about it! It is of no consequence," she whispered to some girls and boys who were loudly wondering and guessing about the mysterious theft.
Then they all went into the sitting-room, and the Virginia reel, the old-fashioned dance with which Butternut Corner festivities almost always began, was danced, and no one thought any more of the stolen chickens.
Ruby Nutting had come by this time, and she led the dance, as usual the life of the good time. She had come in Horace Barker's sleigh, and she gayly evaded the wonderings and reproaches of the party she had left. As the dance ended, Berta Treadwell beckoned slyly to Patty. Berta was Viola Pitkin's cousin, who had come all the way from California to visit her; she and Patty had "taken to" each other at once.
"I want you to see such a funny thing!" whispered Berta, drawing Patty out into the back entry. "That queer-looking girl they call Tilly, with the wispy black hair and the faded cotton dress, asked me to lend her a pair of knitting-needles! I got grandma's for her, and she snatched them out of my hands, she was so eager. 'You needn't tell anybody that I asked you for 'em, either,' she said, in that sharp way of hers. I had such a curiosity to know what she was going to do with them that I watched her. After a while, when the reel was begun and she thought no one was looking, she slipped out through the wood-shed into the barn. Come and peep through the crack!"
Patty followed Berta softly through the wood-shed, and looked through a chink in the rough board partition into the barn.
On an inverted bucket, with a lantern hung upon a nail over her head, sat Tilly Coombs diligently knitting. The barn was cold; the cattle's breaths made vapors, and there was a glitter of frost around the beams. Tilly was muffled in a shawl, but her face looked pinched and blue.
"What is she knitting? It looks like a red mitten," whispered Berta. "Is she so industrious? To think of leaving a party on a winter night to go out to the barn and knit! Do you think we ought to leave her there in the cold? I should think she must be crazy!"
Patty was drawing Berta back through the wood-shed eagerly, in silence. Berta had not heard about the ravelled mitten; she did not know that Tilly was trying to knit it into shape again so it would never be known that it was her mitten that was ravelled.