The Secret Mark Part 26

There was no time for explanations that night. The fire had been checked; the cottage and the rare books were safe, but there were many other things to be attended to. It was several days before Lucile met Harry Brock again and then it was by appointment, in the Cozy Corner Tea Room.

Her time during the intervening days was taken up with affairs relating to her new charge, the child refugee, Marie. She went at once to Frank Morrow for advice. He expressed great surprise at the turn events had taken but told her that he had suspected from the day she had told the story to him that the books had been stolen from Monsieur Le Bon.

"And now we will catch the thief and if he has money we will make him pay," he declared stoutly.

He made good his declaration. Through the loosely joined but powerful league of book sellers he tracked down the man with the birthmark on his chin and forced him to admit the theft of the case of valuable books. As for money with which to make rest.i.tution, like most of his kind he had none. He could only be turned over to the "Tombs" to work out his atonement.

The books taken from the university and elsewhere were offered back to the last purchasers. In most cases they returned them as the child's rightful possession, to be sold together with the many other rare books which had been left to Marie by Monsieur Le Bon. In all there was quite a tidy sum of money realized from the sale. This was put in trust for Marie, the income from it to be used for her education.

As for that meeting of Lucile and Harry in the tea room, it was little more than a series of exclamations on the part of one or the other of them as they related their part in the mysterious drama.

"And you followed us right out into the country that night we went to the Ramsey cottage?" Lucile exclaimed.

"Yes, up to the wall," Harry admitted. "The water stopped me there."

"And it was you who told the police I was in danger when that terrible man and woman locked me in?"

Harry bowed his a.s.sent.

He related how night after night, without understanding their strange wanderings, he had followed the two girls about as a sort of bodyguard.

When Lucile thought how many sleepless nights it had cost him, her heart was too full for words. She tried to thank him. Her lips would not form words.

"But don't you see," he smiled; "you were trying to help someone out of her difficulties and I was trying to help you. That's the way the whole world needs to live, I guess, if we are all to be happy."

Lucile smiled and agreed that he had expressed it quite correctly, but down deep in her heart she knew that she would never feel quite the same toward any of her other fellow students as she did toward him at that moment. And so their tea-party ended.

Frank Morrow insisted on the girls' accepting the two-hundred-dollar reward. There were two other rewards which had been offered for the return of missing books, so in the end Lucile and Florence found themselves in a rather better financial state.

As for Marie, she was taken into the practice school of the university.

By special arrangement she was given a room in the ladies' dormitory. It was close to that of her good friends, Lucile and Florence, so she was never lonely, and in this atmosphere which was the world she was meant to live in she blossomed out like a flower in the spring suns.h.i.+ne.