“On what seems right to me after I have had time to think, and after you have seen your father.  I must go, Crawford.  Thank you for calling me.  I am glad you did.  Good-by.”

“Wait!  Mary, don’t go!  Let me say this—­”

“Please, Crawford!  I’d rather you wouldn’t say any more.  You understand why, I’m sure.  I hope you will have a pleasant trip home and find your father’s health much improved.  Good-by.”

She hung up the receiver and hastened back to the store.  Shadrach and Zoeth looked at her questioningly.  Finally the former said: 

“Anything important, was it?”

“No, Uncle Shad, not very important.”

“Oh!”

A short interval of silence, then—­

“Mrs. Wyeth callin’, I presume likely, eh?”

“No, Uncle Shad.”

Shadrach asked no more questions, and Zoeth asked none.  Neither of them again mentioned Mary’s call to the phone, either to her or to each other.  And she did not refer to it.  She had promised her Uncle Shadrach, when he questioned her the year before concerning Crawford, to tell him “when there was anything to tell.”  But was there anything to tell now?  With the task which she had set herself and the uncertainty before her she felt that there was not.  Yet to keep silence troubled her.  Until recently there had never been a secret between her uncles and herself; now there were secrets on both sides.

CHAPTER XIX

At twelve o’clock on a night late in the following week Captain Shadrach, snoring gloriously in his bed, was awakened by his partner’s entering the room bearing a lighted lamp.  The Captain blinked, raised himself on his elbow, looked at his watch which was on the chair by the bed’s head, and then demanded in an outraged whisper: 

“What in the nation are you prowlin’ around this hour of the night for?  You don’t want to talk about those divilish bills and credits and things, I hope.  What’s the use?  Talkin’ don’t help none!  Jumpin’ fire!  I went to bed so’s to forget ’em and I was just beginnin’ to do it.  Now you—­”

Zoeth held up his hand.  “Sshh! sshh!” he whispered.  “Hush, Shadrach!  I didn’t come to talk about those things.  Shadrach, there’s—­there’s somethin’ queer goin’ on.  Get up!”

The Captain was out of bed in a moment.

“What’s the matter?” he demanded, in a whisper.  “What’s queer?”

“I—­I don’t exactly know.  I heard somebody movin’ downstairs and—­”

Shadrach grunted.  “Isaiah!” he exclaimed.  “Walkin’ in his sleep again, I’ll bet a dollar!”

“No, no!  It ain’t Isaiah.  Isaiah ain’t walked in his sleep since he was a child.”

“Well, he’s pretty nigh his second childhood now, judgin’ by the way he acts sometimes.  It was Isaiah of course!  Who else would be walkin’ around downstairs this time of night?”

“That’s what I thought, so I went and looked.  Shadrach, it was Mary-’Gusta.  Hush!  Let me tell you!  She had her things on, hat and all, and she took the lantern and lit it and went out.”