“I—­don’t just know—­but I do.  You wait here.”  She came back a little later, dusty, cobwebby, flushed.  “I knew there wasn’t anything there—­in the dark more’n the light,” she said.  “I know it, and still I just have to make myself not be scared.  Whew!  It’s hot up there.  Lizzie, let’s go in the parlor.  I’ve not been in there yet.”

“No,” objected Lizzie.  “The little old lady’s in there—­or in the room back of it.  Them’s her rooms.”

“The little old lady? who is she?” inquired Anne.

“She’s the one I take breakfast and dinner and supper to.  She comes here in the summer and she sits in there and rocks and reads.”

“Doesn’t she ever go out?” Anne wanted to know.

“Oh, yes! she walks in the yard or garden every day.  You just ain’t happened to see her.  We’ve played away from the house so much.”

“What kind of looking lady is she?” asked Anne.

“Oh, she’s just a lady.  Ma says she’s mighty hotty.  What’s hotty, Anne?” inquired Lizzie.

Haughty was a new word to Anne.  But she hated to say “I don’t know,” and besides words made to her pictures—­queer ones sometimes—­of their meaning.  “It means she warms up quick,” she asserted.  “Tell me about her, Lizzie.  How does she look?”

“She ain’t so very tall and she’s slim as a bean-pole,” said Lizzie.  “Her hair’s gray and her skin is white and wrinkly.  And she wears long black dresses.  That’s all I know.”

“I want to see her.  Let’s sit at the head of the steps and watch for her to come out,” suggested Anne.

They sat there what seemed a long time but as the little old lady did not appear, they finally ran off to play with Honey-Sweet and Nancy Jane.

While they were thus engaged, Mr. Collins came from the mill.  He shook his dripping hat, and hung up the stiff yellow rain-coat that he called a ‘slicker.’

“I come by the station, wife,” he announced.  “And what you think?  Thar’s a gre’t big sign up, ‘Lost child.’”

“Sho!  Whose child’s lost?” inquired Mrs. Collins.

“It’s Anne,” was the reply.  “The printed paper give her name and age and all.  And it tells anybody that’s found her or got news of her to let them ’sylum folks know.”

“As if anybody with a heart in their body would do that!” commented Mrs. Collins.  “I bound you let folks know she was here.  If you jest had sense enough to keep yo’ mouth shet, Peter Collins!  That long tongue of yours goin’ to be the ruin of you yet.”

“I ain’t unparted my lips,” asserted her husband.

“Now ain’t that jest like a man?” Mrs. Collins demanded of the clock.  “’Stead of trying to throw folks off the track, saying something like ‘What on earth’s a lost child doing here?’ or ’Nobody’d ’spect a lost child to come to my house!’”

“I wish you’d been thar, Lizbeth,” said her admiring husband.  “You’d fixed it up.  Well, anyhow, I ain’t said a word, so don’t nobody know nothin’ from me.  All she’s got to do is to lay low till this hub-bub’s over.”