dry."

She hustled Henrietta into the house, but kindly. She even knelt down
beside her and began to unfasten the child's dress after lighting the
fire that she had herself suggested. "Spooks" were evidently wiped
from Amy's memory; but she flinched every time it lightened, as it
did occasionally for some time.

"Say!" said the wondering Henrietta hoarsely. "I'm just as dirty as I
was the other day. You don't haf to touch me."

"Oh, dear me!" cried Amy. "This child is never going to forgive me for
that. Won't you like me a little, Henrietta?"

"Not as much as that other one," said the freckle-faced girl frankly.

Jessie, who was taking off her own outer garments to hang before the
now roaring fire, only laughed at that.

"Tell us," she said, "why you think your cousin was carried off?"

"That lady she lived with was awful mad when she came to Foleys
looking for Bertha. She said she'd put Bertha where she wouldn't run
away again for one while. That's what she said."

"Oh, my dear!" exclaimed Amy suddenly. "Do you suppose--Child! did the
woman come to your house----"

"Foley's house. I ain't got a house," declared Henrietta.

"Well, to Mrs. Foley's house in a big maroon automobile?" finished
Amy.

"No'm. Didn't come in a car at all. She came on foot, she did. She
said Bertha was a silly to run away when nothing was going to hurt
her. But she looked mad enough to hurt her," concluded the observant
Henrietta.

"Oh!" exclaimed Amy again. "Was she dark and thin and--and waspish
looking?"

"Who was?" asked the child, staring.

"The woman who asked for Bertha," explained Jessie, quite as eagerly
as her chum.

"She wasn't no wasp," drawled Henrietta, with indescribable scorn.
"She was big around, like a barrel. She was fat, and red, and ugly. I
don't like that woman. And I guess Bertha had a right to run away from
her."

Jessie and Amy looked at each other and nodded. They had both decided
that the girl, Bertha, was the one they had seen carried off in the
big French car.

"And you don't know what Bertha was afraid of?" asked Jessie.

"I dunno. She just wrote me--I can read writing--that she was coming
to see me at Foley's. And she never come."

"Of course you did not hear anything about her when you searched up
and down the boulevard the other day?" Amy asked.

"There wouldn't many of 'em answer questions," said the child
gloomily. "Some of 'em shooed me out of their yards before I could
ask."

Am