Page:Keeping the Peace.pdf/178

 ward's hands in hers. "You know that I wrote to you," she said. "Don't you know that I did?"

"And don't you know I wrote to you?"

Here Mr. Ruggles, smiling in his kindly, cynical way, joined them. "Tampering with the U. S. mails," he said, "is a prison offense. Now who, I wonder, has been tampering? I can assure you, Edward, that it isn't any of the Ruggles family."

"I wrote to you twice," said Alice.

"I wrote to you five times," said Edward. "I would have written six times but I couldn't lay my hands on a sixth stamp. As a matter of fact I did write six times, but I only mailed five."

"Did you mail those letters yourself?" asked Mr. Ruggles. "Or did you lay them on the hall table?"

At this moment Mrs. Ruggles joined them and they told her about the letters. She merely smiled.

Both she and her husband as well as Alice and Edward knew who had taken the letters. But Edward found it difficult to name his own mother as the criminal, and the Ruggles family did not do so.

"Next time anybody goes away," said Alice, "we'll be more careful . . . And I thought you didn't like me any more."

"And I thought you didn't like me any more," said Edward.