They were an oddly assorted pair, he so tall, straight, and American, she, despite her ordinary clothes and her careful English, so foreign still. Beatrice thought so, as she came into the kitchen in the late afternoon, and found them both making preparations to depart. The day had been a long and heavy one to her. Her mind was full of what she had seen the night before, although she had not yet had time to discuss it in private with Nancy. She longed to ride over to the Herricks’ house, for what purpose she could not herself say. The pouring rain, however, made such an expedition so unreasonable that she could not, in the whole course of the day, think of an excuse urgent enough to explain her going.
“I wish you were not going to be so wet,” she said to Christina. “You will be soaked again before you get home.”
“It is not raining so much now,” Olaf observed, reaching for his cap that lay on the window-sill, “it will soon—”
He interrupted himself suddenly and turned round to them with a delighted grin. He spoke softly and jerked his head toward the window where, to Beatrice’s astonishment, she saw dimly through the wet pane that a face was peering in. The close-set eyes and ungainly nose showed that it was Dabney Mills.
“I never knew before just what the word eavesdropper meant,” said Olaf. “Think how the water must be pouring off the roof and running down that fellow’s neck!”
Seeing that he had been observed, Dabney came to the door and a moment later stood, a bedraggled and dejected figure, just inside the threshold.
“I was looking in to see if there was any one at home,” he tried to explain, while Olaf supplemented:
“On such a fine day he was afraid you might all be out.”
“I went up the mountain to see if I could get back my note-book,” Dabney went on to account for his forlorn condition. “I have been looking for hours, but I couldn’t find it.”
“Maybe the bear put it in her pocket and went away with it,” suggested Christina flippantly. “Anyway, it would be soaked to a pulp by this time.”
“You needn’t worry, I picked it up last night when I went back to get the milk-can,” Olaf said. He brought the familiar leather-covered book from an inside pocket and held it out to its owner. A wicked twinkle that he could not suppress seemed to fill Dabney Mills with panic-stricken suspicion.