"All right," said Hattie May. "But I've got to keep Hamish in sight." And Eve added, "I guess I'd better go along to look after Hattie May."
So they left me and I heard their voices die away in the distance. I took out my handkerchief and mopped my hot face. I wished that the fountain were playing so that I could have stuck my head into its cooling spray. By and by I heard the others returning. Hattie May's voice was high-pitched and excited but that was nothing unusual.
Hamish was in the lead, he was carrying something under one arm. I looked at Eve and saw that she too was excited. "Well I see you're all here," I remarked.
Hamish walked to the bowl of the fountain and set down the thing he was carrying. "What is it?" I asked. And then, "Why, it's a statue! Where did you get it?"
"Hamish's found it!" Hattie May cried. "He's found the Circe!"
"The Circe!" In truth I had almost forgotten about the missing statue. "Why--where in the world----?"
"It was at the bottom of that awful well!" Hattie May cried.
"I brought it up with me when they hauled me up this morning," Hamish explained, taking off his glasses to wipe them. "I guess you were all too excited to notice it. It was pretty heavy so I just dropped it in the grass and left it. Bein' without my spectacles, I couldn't be sure what it was. You see when Hattie May dropped that bottle down it hit on a stone and broke to smithereens. This was the stone, that's how I happened to find it."
Hattie May threw me a triumphant look. "Don't you think it's the Circe, Sandy?" Eve asked. "You see the arms are broken off but one of them is lifted just as if it might have been holding a wand."
It was true. The little figure was smaller than the other one in the garden and it was so blackened by age that the features were hardly discernible. But there was no doubt that it was a woman's figure and that one arm had been upraised. In spite of myself, I felt a queer shivery thrill as I gazed at it. "But where did it come from?" I demanded eagerly. "Where did it stand?"
"That," said Eve, "is just what we've got to find out. There simply must be a pedestal somewhere that we've overlooked. It certainly was never set up down by that old well, nobody would put a statue in a vacant lot."