"Why, how funny!" exclaimed Amy .

"That's not funny," rejoined Janice seriously. "Is she named Olga Cedarstrom?"

"Goodness! I don't know her last name. She comes from one of our tenant houses. It's far away. Mother sent her home with a flea in her ear, now I tell you, after she had broken that dish."

Janice was disturbed. "I wish you knew her last name. What sort of looking girl is she? Are you sure she has already left the house?"

"Come on!" cried Amy, jumping up. "Let's run around there and see. Take us to the kitchen door, Stella."

"Well, yes. We can look. But I guess she has gone," said the farmer's daughter.

They had been sitting on the front porch. Stella led them quickly around to the rear of the big house.

CHAPTER XIV. COULD IT BE OLGA?

It was a beautiful evening, this of Stella Latham's birthday party. It was not often that the climate gave the people of Greensboro, this early in the season, such a soft and temperate night.

There was no moon, but the stars plentifully besprinkled the heavens, and their light bathed the area surrounding the Latham house, beyond the radiance of the j.a.panese lanterns, sufficiently for the three girls to see objects at some distance.

Before they reached the back door of the farmhouse, Amy cried aloud:

"Oh, girls! What's that? A ghost?"

"Ghost your granny!" exclaimed Stella. "That is somebody running along the hedge in a white skirt."

"It is a woman or a girl," Janice agreed, staring at the rapidly moving figure. "Is there a path there?"

"That is the path to one tenant house. Wait till I ask Anna, the cook."

She hurried to the back door, and her two friends, waiting at the pasture-lane bars, heard her ask if the woman who had broken the dish had gone.

"The awkward thing!" exclaimed Anna, the cook. "She's just this minute left."

"What is her name, Anna?" asked Stella, knowing that Janice was deeply interested.

"I don't know, Miss. Some outlandish Swedish name."

"Olga?"

"Humph! Maybe!"

"Olga Cedarstrom?"

"Goodness me! Don't ask me what else besides 'Olga' she is named," said the irritable cook, "for I couldn't tell you. I couldn't tell you my own name, scarcely, to-night. I'm that flurried."

Hearing all this plainly, Janice murmured to Amy: "I wish I dared follow her. Suppose it should be Olga?"

"Well, she is going right to that small house that belongs to Mr.

Latham. Stella says she lives there, whoever she is."

Just then a figure popped up beside them. Gummy's cheerful voice demanded:

"What's the trouble, girls?"

"Oh!" cried Janice.

"Goodness!" said the boy's sister. "How you scare one, Gummy!

Why, it isn't near time to go home."

"I got off earlier than I expected. So I came out and have been hanging around at the back here for half an hour."

"Oh. Gummy! did you see that woman?" Janice asked, seizing his jacket sleeve.

"What woman?"

"See there?' cried his sister, pointing. "That white thing going over the hill."

"Yes, I saw her. She came out of the kitchen, and she was crying. They had a row in there."

"Oh, Gummy! What did she look like?" murmured Janice.

"Yes, Gummy, tell us quick!" urged his sister.

"I tell you she was crying, and she had her handkerchief up to her face. So I did not see much of it. But her hair was 'la.s.ses color, and she had it bobbed back so tight that I guess she couldn't shut her eyes until she undid it," chuckled Gummy.

"Oh, Amy!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Janice, with clasped hands, "that is the way Olga used to do her hair."

"Not Olga, the Swede, who robbed you?" demanded the boy, interested at once.

"Yes. It might be Olga. If you had only seen her face--"

"I'll see her face all right," declared Gummy, starting off.

"I'll tell you just where she goes and what she looks like.

Don't you girls go home without me."

He was gone on the track of the flying woman like a dart. He was out of sight, being in dark garments, before Stella came back from the kitchen door.

"Don't tell her about Gummy," whispered Amy quickly. "She'll think, maybe, that he's been hanging around like those strange boys over the fence in front."

"Not a word," agreed Janice, smiling. "I wouldn't give Gummy away."

"There isn't anybody in the kitchen who knows that girl very well," said Stella, who was really showing herself interested in Janice Day's trouble. "I asked them all. This girl, Olga, is staying with Mrs. Johnson. Mrs. Johnson has a little baby to care for and couldn't come to-night. So this friend of hers came up to help. And she helped all right!" concluded Stella, with emphasis. "That dish is in a thousand pieces."

"Isn't it too bad?" said Amy, sympathetically.

"It's a mean shame," Stella declared. "I bet she'd steal. You'd better come over here tomorrow and find her. I'll bring you back in the auto with me after I go shopping, and we'll ride around by Mr. Johnson's house. He's one of father's farmers, you know."