“Please tell me, Doctor, where did you find that thing, and what is it?”
“Find it?” exclaimed Mrs. Dryer. “I found it myself up in the steeple, where it was tolling the bell.”
“Tolling the bell!”
“Yes, sir, that and the wind, just as you meant it should. Do you suppose the Ogleport Academy supplies philosophical apparatus for tolling bells with?”
George Brayton’s face had been getting redder and redder, and Euphemia’s handkerchief was not at her eyes, by any means, but he managed to stammer out:
“Have you asked Zeb Fuller about it?”
There was a sort of magic in the mention of that name, at least, to anybody in Ogleport, and it suddenly occurred to Mrs. Dryer that it was, indeed, from Zeb that her suspicions—information she had deemed it—had been derived, and at the same moment the Doctor himself began to wrestle with a new idea.
“Dorothy Jane,” he remarked, “I begin to fear that——”
But Effie had restrained her mirth as long as was in any way possible, and George Brayton permitted himself to catch the infection of it very freely.
“Dr. Dryer,” he said, as soon as he could speak plainly again, “this must, indeed, be looked into; but we had better take our time at it. Other hands than Zeb’s have been at work on that affair. Mrs. Dryer deserves great credit for detecting it. I will come over again after tea, and she must tell me all about it. Just now I can’t stay any longer.”