Liddy
is never so happy as when she is making herself wretched, and now
her mouth drooped while her eyes were triumphant.
"I always said there were plenty of things going on here,
right under our noses, that we couldn't see," she said, holding
out her apron.
"I don't see with my nose," I remarked. "What have you got
there?"
Liddy pushed aside a half-dozen geranium pots, and in the space
thus cleared she dumped the contents of her apron--a handful of
tiny bits of paper. Alex had stepped back, but I saw him
watching her curiously.
"Wait a moment, Liddy," I said. "You have been going through the
library paper-basket again!"
Liddy was arranging her bits of paper with the skill of long
practice and paid no attention.
"Did it ever occur to you," I went on, putting my hand over the
scraps, "that when people tear up their correspondence, it is for
the express purpose of keeping it from being read?"
"If they wasn't ashamed of it they wouldn't take so much trouble,
Miss Rachel," Liddy said oracularly. "More than that, with
things happening every day, I consider it my duty. If you don't
read and act on this, I shall give it to that Jamieson, and I'll
venture he'll not go back to the city to-day."
That decided me. If the scraps had anything to do with the
mystery ordinary conventions had no value. So Liddy arranged the
scraps, like working out one of the puzzle-pictures children play
with, and she did it with much the same eagerness.
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