secret, and we could talk freely before him. And though he could not advise us, he listened to the recitals of our experiences and the reiterations of our hopes and fears with remarkable fortitude. He was quite handsome, with dark, sympathetic eyes, and a friendly smile. We took to him immediately, and it came to be quite a matter of course that Mr. Otis should appear in our drawing room (or rather, the drawing room which we fondly hoped would some day be ours) several times a week.
I sometimes fancied, though, for all his apparent interest in our one absorbing topic, that somehow Mr. Otis disapproved of it, and even, occasionally, avoided talking about it. At such times he would listen to Caroline's music, or read Browning and Ruskin with Ellen Ann, or even talk nonsense with me.
In this pleasant way winter slipped into spring, and the hiding place of the iron box still remained a mystery. One morning, Ellen Ann appeared before us, her clothing covered with dust, and a zigzag line of soot running from chin to eyebrow.
"The sign is in the cellar; hurry up!" she exclaimed.
We hurried up—and down. There in plain sight, laid on end in the hard cement floor, were two circles of bricks, one within the other. We looked and looked again. To be sure; how blind we had been!
Then three young women who had once refused, respectively, to milk a cow, to piece a quilt, and to cut grass with shears, now took hammer, chisel, crowbar, and spade, and pried up those bricks and dug the earth out from under them. After two days of this, we collapsed and took to our beds.
Before that mother had maintained a position of strict neutrality; she now asserted her authority and said such foolishness must stop. We must use reason or give up the search altogether.
"Mr. Otis called this evening," she added, "and I was forced to invent excuses for you. I was ashamed to give the true reason why none of you could receive him."
Our answer to that was one dismal, triple groan.
However, we received mother's admonitions with becoming meekness and refrained from further research for a time. Meanwhile a judicious use of liniment restored our muscles to their normal condition.
