She took her knitting out of the bird-cage and began to knit at full speed.

“Danny me man, it is a good thing for ye that the shaddah of suspicion is on yer sister Pearlie this day, for it gives her a good chance to turn yer heel.  ‘Sowin’ in the sunshine, sowin’ in the shaddah,’ only it’s knittin’ I am instead of sewin’, but it’s all wan, I guess.  I mind how Paul and Silas were singin’ in the prison at midnight.  I know how they felt.  ‘Do what Ye like, Lord,’ they wur thinkin’.  ’If it’s in jail Ye want us to stay, we’re Yer men.’”

Pearl knit a few minutes in silence.  Then she knelt beside the bed.

“Dear Lord,” she prayed, clasping her work-worn hands, “help her to find her money, but if anyone did steal it, give him the strength to confess it, dear Lord.  Amen.”

Mrs. Motherwell, downstairs, was having a worse time than Pearl.  She could not make herself believe that Pearl had stolen the money, and yet no one had had a chance to take it except Pearl, or Tom, and that, of course, was absurd.  She went again to have a look in every drawer in her room, and as she passed through the hall she detected a strange odour.  She soon traced it to Tom’s light overcoat which hung there.  What was the smell?  It was tobacco, and something more.  It was the smell of a bar-room!

She sat down upon the step with a nameless dread in her heart.  Tom had gone to Millford several times since his father had gone to Winnipeg, and he had stayed longer than was necessary, too; but no, no.  Tom would not spend good money that way.  The habit of years was on her.  It was the money she thought of first.

Then she thought of Pearl.

Going to the foot of the stairway she called: 

“Pearl, you may come down now.”

“Did ye find it?” Pearl asked eagerly.

“No.”

“Do ye still think I took it?”

“No, I don’t, Pearl,” she answered.

“All right then, I’ll come right down,” Pearl said gladly.

CHAPTER XXIII SAVED!

That night Arthur’s condition was, to Pearl’s sharp eyes, alarming.

He tried to quiet her fears.  He would be well directly, it was nothing, nothing at all, a mere indisposition (Pearl didn’t know what that was); but when she went into the granary with a pitcher of water for him, and found him writing letters in the feeble light of a lantern, she took one look at him, laid down the pitcher and hurried out to tell Tom.

Tom was in the kitchen taking off his boots preparatory to going to bed.

“Tom,” she said excitedly, “get back into yer boots, and go for the doctor.  Arthur’s got the thing that Pa had, and it’ll have to be cut out of him or he’ll die.”

“What?” Tom gasped, with one foot across his knee.

“I think he has it,” Pearl said, “he’s actin’ just like what Pa did, and he’s in awful pain, I know, only he won’t let on; and we must get the doctor or he might die before mornin’, and then how’d we feel?”