"The squire and David and Alvin Koehler together at the Mennonite's!" cried Susannah.
"Perhaps he is to marry her and Alvin," suggested a voice at the edge of the crowd.
"David used to sit with her, too, sometimes," Sarah Knerr reminded the others. "Perhaps there is trouble and it will give a court hearing."
"Humbug!" cried Bevy. "You don't know anything about it!"
Bevy, of course, knew nothing about it either.
Almost bursting with curiosity, Bevy made her noodle soup. It was only because she was not a literary person that the delicious portions of dough which gave the soup its name were not cut into exclamation points and question marks. Bevy was suffering; when the squire brought David home with him, her uneasiness became distressing to see. Presently she was thrown into a state bordering on insanity.
David laid down his fork and looked across the table at her restless figure.
"Bevy," said he in an ordinary tone, "the communion set has been found."
All her speculations had arrived at no such wonderful conclusion as this. The squire looked startled; he had wondered how the report would first reach Millerstown.
"Did Koehler tell?" demanded Bevy. "Did he tell where he put it? Is it any good yet? Will they use it? Did you come to it by accident? Did--" Bevy's breath failed.
"Koehler had nothing to do with it," said David. "My father put it into the hole made by plastering up the window in the church. There it lay all these years."
"He never meant to take it!" screamed Bevy.
"No," agreed David; "I do not believe he meant to take it."
"Nobody knows," interposed the squire. "Now, Bevy, get the pie."
Immediately Bevy started for her kitchen. When after a few minutes she had not reappeared, the squire followed her. The kitchen was empty, no Bevy was to be seen; but from across the yard a loud chattering issued from Edwin's Sally's kitchen.
In the evening the squire and the preacher came and sat with David on his porch. The communion set had been taken from its hiding-place and the preacher's wife had polished it until it was once more bright and beautiful. Millerstown dropped in by twos and threes to behold it, each with his own eyes. The squire and the preacher and David talked about many things of interest to Millerstown and to the world at large. When the two men went away together, they said that David had astonished them.