"Prayers, no!" Jinty was shocked. "I only pray to our Father and to the good Jesus. Why, you wouldn't pray to a picture?"
Ah Lon was silent. So perhaps she had been praying to the sweet painted face already, who could say?
It was soon after this talk that the two little girls sat in the study one morning. Ah Lon was at the table by the side of the professor, an open atlas between them and the old gentleman in his element.
But Jinty sat apart, strangely quiet.
Ah Lon, watching out of her slits of eyes, had never seen Jinty so dull and silent. And all that summer day it was the same.
"What's amiss with my dear maid?" anxiously asked Mrs. Barbara, when bed-time came.
Then it all came out.
"I've lost my pearl-rimmed locket!" sobbed Jinty. "Ah Lon asked to look at it this morning the first thing; she always does, you know. And I took it off, and then Mike pecked my legs and Ah Lon's so hard that we both ran away screaming, and I must have dropped the locket—and it's gone!"
"Gone! That can't be! Unless—unless——" Mrs. Barbara hesitated, and Jinty knew they were thinking the same thing. "Have you told Ah Lon, deary?"
"I did this afternoon, and she cried. I never saw her cry before!"