Miss Milly regarded her for a moment. "I _told_ Sabrina that you wouldn't know! But may be you ought to. Somehow, telling things, too, makes them seem not so dreadful! I believe we Leavitts lock troubles away too much--don't air them enough, maybe. Sabrina thinks it's as dreadful now as it was the day it happened. It was about our brother. He was a year older than Sabrina. He wasn't at all like her, though, nor like my father. He was gay and handsome, and high-spirited and dreadfully extravagant. When I was very small I used to be frightened at the quarrels between him and my father--and they were always over money. "One night--he had come home just before supper after being away for a week, no one knew where, and my father was very angry about that--they had a quarrel that seemed more bitter than any other. Besides, there was a thunder-storm that made it seem worse. I had been sent to bed, but the lightning had frightened me, and I had crept downstairs to the sitting-room. I opened the door. They were all three--for Sabrina always sided with my father--talking so loudly they did not hear me. My father's face frightened me more than the lightning and my brother's had turned dead white. I think my father had just offered him some money, for his wallet was in his hand and on the floor lay a bill, as though my brother had thrown it back. I began to cry and ran back to my room, more frightened by them than by the storm. And I lay there in my bed for hours, waiting for something to happen!" "About midnight one dreadful bolt of lightning struck the house. It shattered the chimney all to pieces on the outside and inside, filled the sitting-room with dust and pieces of mortar, cracked the mantel and moved it an inch and a half from the wall. But no one thought much of all that, because something far more dreadful had happened! My brother was gone and my father's wallet, the one I had seen in his hand, was missing. He remembered laying it on the mantel and my brother and Sabrina had seen him do it. It had contained over a thousand dollars in bank notes. The next day my father found out that my brother had taken the early train out of North Hero. I was too young to understand much about it, but I used to pray, first, that my brother would come back and tell them he _didn't_ take the wallet and then I'd pray that he'd never, never come back, so that they couldn't put him in prison." "That must have been Anne's grandfather," Nancy was thinking.