"Would that make him know everything about it?" Dot pursued, with her usual insistence.

"Of course," was the thoughtless reply.

"Then why didn't he see Carrie Pendleton's father do it-do whatever he says he did?"

"Good gracious alive!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Miss t.i.tus. "Was there ever such a child for asking questions? I should think your jaws 'ud ache trying to find out things."

"They don't," said Dot, rather hurt.

"And I should think," went on the seamstress, "that you had asked so many questions that there wasn't another thing in this world for you to learn. Is there anything that you really don't know, that you'd like to have me tell you, Dorothy Kenway?"

Dot brightened tremendously. She became quite eager.

"Oh, yes, Miss t.i.tus! There's one thing that's been bothering me for a long time and n.o.body-n.o.body can't seem to tell me."

"Tell Miss t.i.tus, honey," said the woman, who really loved the little girl, after all. "Maybe I can give you the answer."

"Well, then," said Dot, coming nearer to lean against the woman's knee, "tell me, will you please, why it is little fishes don't drown before they grow up and learn to swim?"

It was quite evident that the story of Mr. Pendleton's misfortune was spreading all through certain strata of Milton society. Although Ruth was sorry for this fact, she could only hope that Mr. Howbridge's clerk could uproot some information regarding the robbery of the Kolbeck and Roods warehouse that would explain away the suspicion attached to the unfortunate man.

For neither she nor Agnes, nor Neale nor Luke, believed that a man like Oscar Pendleton could be guilty of robbery. And while the injured man was confined to the house the Kenways and Neale showed in every way they could their friendliness for the Pendletons. Of course, Luke Shepard had gone back to college and could have no part in what the others tried to do for the unfortunate family.

All their thought was not given to this matter, however. That dance at Carrie Poole's loomed, before Agnes at least, as one of the most important things that had ever entered into her life. Even Ruth put special importance upon the affair, and that for more than one reason.

The Pooles had engaged a string band from the city, a decorator from the same big town, and a famous caterer. There would be invited guests from Washington, including members of some of the foreign emba.s.sies and their wives and daughters. For Carrie Poole's father during the last eighteen months had served the district in Washington as representative; and the family was, as Agnes said, "cutting a wide swath."

"But 'tis borne on my mind," Mrs. McCall, the Corner House housekeeper declared, "that them's not fittin' frocks for a pair o' young leddies to wear on a cold winter night. Hech! They are like gossamer, so they are."

"Now, dear Mrs. Mac!" cried Agnes, "don't carp and criticize. Aren't they pretty?" and she pirouetted before the good matron to display her own new dress.

"Pretty enough for the stage. But nae sensible," sniffed the housekeeper. "I'm astonished at Ruth, so I am."

"Now, don't!" gasped Agnes. "Don't criticize Ruth when for once in her life she is thinking more of her good looks than of her good sense."

"Ye've said muckle when ye say that," sniffed Mrs. MacCall. "There is nae guid sense in it. And both of ye hoa.r.s.e as crows with a cold."

"Am not!" denied Agnes hastily.

She was hoa.r.s.e, however, as was Ruth. Somehow, the colds the two girls had caught in some mysterious way, continued to cling to them. Agnes was so afraid that her older, and usually so much more sensible sister, would at the last moment refuse to go to the party that she did not know what to do. She confessed this to Neale O'Neil.

"If you ask me," said the boy with more gravity than he usually displayed, "I think you'd both be sensible if you cut the party. I hate to hear you hacking around like a dull meat-ax, Aggie."

"How horrid!" she cried.

He grinned ruefully. "It threatens a bad night. I'll make you as warm as I can in the car. But it isn't like a limousine."

"Oh, dear," sighed Agnes, the young elegant. "I think we should have a closed car for winter. If Ruth would only speak to Mr. Howbridge about it--"

When the evening drew in and the time arrived for them to start for the Poole house, Neale O'Neil brought the car to the side door. Ruth and Agnes appeared, bundled in their furs, but of course, and especially on Agnes' part, with a plentiful display of the thinnest of silk hose above dancing pumps.

"Whew!" whistled Neale, holding open the tonneau door for the sisters.

"The foolish virgins certainly are in evidence to-night. It's going to snow and hail and sleet and everything else mean, before we get home."

"See that you put in the tire chains then, Neale," was all that Ruth vouchsafed him.

Perhaps, already, she was secretly admitting the folly of this venture.

CHAPTER V

SOMEBODY PAYS THE FIDDLER

If Neale O'Neil was not a good prophet, he certainly was a sure prophet, and Agnes Kenway admitted it. When the time came to leave the Poole party it did everything that the young fellow had said it would. It was as nasty and as cold a night as the two sisters ever remembered being out in.

Worst of all, in spite of the antiskid chains that Neale had spent a good hour from the party in adjusting to the rear wheels, something else went wrong, as he expressed it, and for fifteen long minutes they were stalled on the wind-swept Buckshot Road.

The icy fingers of that wind, if not the snow and sleet itself, sought the girls out, through every cranny of the automobile top. Ruth murmured an admission that her sister was right. They should have a closed car for winter.

By and by, when Neale managed to coax the engine to start again, the girls were clinging together for warmth and their teeth were chattering.

Neale insisted on putting his robe about them in addition to their own, and drove barelapped himself for the rest of the journey.

Mrs. MacCall never went to bed when any of the flock were out in the evening, especially on a stormy night. On this night, Linda, the Finnish girl, had fallen out of her chair asleep before the kitchen stove and had been driven up to her room in a sleep-walking trance by the good housekeeper two hours before the arrival of Ruth and Agnes.

Tom Jonah, the faithful old watch dog, rose yawning from his place behind the stove as the girls stumbled into the kitchen. He went out with Neale to see if it really was as bad a night as it sounded.

"Ye puir bairns!" gasped Mrs. MacCall when she saw them. "Ye're blue with the cold and perished of the snaw. Hech! Hech! What will Mr.

Howbridge say to this, I want to know?"

"You ask him, Mrs. Mac," faintly said the younger girl. "Oh!" and she began to cough.

"Hot drinks, Mrs. Mac, please," said Ruth, trying to speak cheerfully.

"I fear we have been very foolish. I fear we have."

For once Mrs. MacCall did not scold when chances had been taken with her charges' health. In fact the housekeeper considered the matter too serious. When she had hurried the sisters up to their rooms, she proceeded to telephone to Dr. Forsyth.

Dr. Forsyth had more than a pract.i.tioner's interest in the Corner House girls. He had been treating Ruth and Agnes for their colds already. And when he heard over the telephone that they had been out into the country on this terrible night, he declared his intention of coming right over.

Dr. Forsyth had only turned away from his telephone, shivering a little in his bathrobe at the prospect of venturing out into the snow squalls, when he heard a dog barking at his door and an automobile horn tooting at the gate. He hurried to peer through the gla.s.s beside the door, and there saw the big head of Tom Jonah poked right against the gla.s.s.

"I'll be right out, Neale!" shouted the doctor, glad enough that he had not to go out to the garage and tune up his own cold motor.

Neale had had the same thought Mrs. MacCall had. He knew that Agnes, whom he loved so dearly and with reason, and Ruth were both in need of immediate attention by the medical man. Dr. Forsyth got out as soon as he could, and Neale drove him back to the Corner House and waited there to take him home again.