"Little Miss Joy would tell me to pray to God to help me to find it. He would hear _her_. Will He hear me, I wonder?"
Then poor Bet uttered a few words, calling on God, who saw everything, to show her where what she sought lay hid.
She redoubled her efforts, and moving a little further from the house, she dug another hole till she came to some bricks. She lifted them, and there was the little cash-box--empty now, but, oh! of what priceless value!
Bet gathered up her stray tools, and putting on her hat, ran off again along the sand by the sea-shore, now left hard by the retreating tide, on and on to the farther end of that part of Yarmouth where a road, then lately made, led towards Gorlestone. Breathless and panting she reached the first of two pretty houses standing together, with a strip of garden in front, bright now with wallflowers and hardy hepaticas and celandines.
Under the porch of the first, smoking his pipe, sat Uncle Bobo; and warmly covered with a rug, in a reclining chair by his side, was little Miss Joy.
Maggie Chanter was sowing some seeds in the window-box of the next house, and Mrs. Harrison was standing by the porch, waiting and watching. She had her knitting in her hand, but her eyes were on the sea, with the same wistful longing in them as of old.
"Jack is come home. Jack!" gasped Bet. "They say he stole the cash-box, but--but--I've found it. Quick! take it to Uncle Joe, and say I found it in the ground at the back of grannie's old home."
Sudden news, whether it be good or bad, is always a shock; and when Patience Harrison caught the cry repeated by Maggie Chanter, "Jack is come home!" and echoed by little Miss Joy's silvery voice, and old Uncle Bobo's bass, "Jack is come home!" she sank back in the porch and gasped for breath.
Presently the little gate was opened by George Paterson, who hastily asked--
"What is the matter? Jack come home? Well, that's good news."
"Yes," Maggie Chanter said; "but Bet there has some other news, which is not so good. They dare to say Jack stole the cash-box the day he ran off, and they have locked him up."
"But he didn't, he didn't," Bet said, recovering her breath at last. "Here it is; take it to Uncle Joe, and tell him where I found it."