As for Annie Laurie, she refrained with a mighty effort from confiding her suspicions to her aunts, and she warned her friends not to tell them. Had they mulled that matter over and over during the long, lonely winter evenings, the poor girl would have felt as if she were losing her reason as well as her fortune. Indeed, the winter had settled down heavily over the Pace household. The dairy met with reverses. Two of the best cows died. The accounts would not balance. And worst of all, the helpers were hard to manage and would not take orders willingly from Miss Adnah. The strong will and hand of Simeon Pace were sorely missed.
And along with all this distress was the sense that Annie Laurie and her aunts had of burning injustice. Somewhere in the world was money in abundance, belonging to them. Just how much it was they could not even guess. Of Mr. Carson’s purchase money of twenty thousand dollars they felt sure. He had Simeon Pace’s receipt to show for that. But there was other money beyond question—the savings of years. The old aunts, waking in the night, would arise and fumble in the places in which they had looked so often; and Annie Laurie, strong and sensible as she was, found that it required all of her will to keep from following their example.
This girl, so straightforward, so energetic and hopeful by nature, found it almost intolerable to sit around, patient under injustice. She proposed to Mr. Carson that he should go to Hector Disbrow and accuse him of the theft of the money—tell him the whole thing was known, and that he must refund it or be arrested. But Mr. Carson shook his head.
“As a matter of fact, my dear,” he said, “the thing isn’t known at all. It is only surmised. Azalea, in semi-darkness, thought she saw your father put something in his arm. She may have been mistaken. Or even if she were not mistaken about his doing so on that particular occasion, it doesn’t in the least follow that your father carried the money in question there. Above all, it does not follow that it was in the arm the day of his death; or that, even if it was there, that the undertaker stole it. The tin arm must have hung in the room for days. Many persons visited that room. Any one of them might be guilty.”