Everybody liked Caleb. Even old man Scroggie had been fond of him, which is saying a great deal. It was said the old miser even trusted the gaunt storekeeper to a certain degree. At any rate it was commonly known that shortly before he died Scroggie had given into Spencer's keeping, to be locked away in his rusty old store safe, a certain legal-looking document. Deacon Ringold and Cobin Keeler had witnessed the transaction. Accordingly, after Scroggie was buried and a search for the will failed to disclose it, it was perhaps natural that a delegation of neighbors should wait on Caleb and question him concerning the paper which the deceased man had given him. To everybody's surprise Caleb had flared up and told the delegation that the paper in question was the consummation of a private matter between himself and the dead man, and that he didn't have to show it and didn't intend to show it.,
Lucy was not a young lady to sit idle. She could find something to do in every hour in the day. As Miss Acton did the housekeeping, Lucy was left to her own inventions, and being a girl of several[Pg 83] resources, she was very happy in pleasing herself. Miss Acton went to look after the affairs of the home, and to attend to the needs of a little congregation of poor who were ushered into the housekeeper's room one after another every morning, excepting Sunday, where they stated their wants and obtained such relief as Miss Acton's closets, stocked from her own purse, could supply; and if they did not get always exactly what they wished, they were sure of tender and consoling words, of sympathetic enquiry into their troubles, of a promise of some stockings for little James next week, of a roll of flannel for old Martha the day after to-morrow. Pleasant and instructive it might have been to witness this old lady in her hoop and flowered gown asking questions, handing purges, promising little gifts of apparel to the poor people, who ceaselessly sank in curtsies, or plucked at wisps of hair upon their foreheads whilst they scraped the ground behind with their feet.,
"I regret to have to say it," said Miss Acton, "but I must think—I cannot help it, that Mr Lawrence's hand is in this strange disappearance of my niece.".
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