“Who lives along that way?” asked Jennie, meaning the occupants of the several rooms the windows of which overlooked the ledge on the west side of the building.
“Why—May MacGreggor for one,” said Helen. “But it wouldn’t be May. She’s not snoopy.”
“I should say not! Nor is Rebecca Frayne,” Ruth said. “She has the fifth room away. And girls! I believe Rebecca would be delighted to go with us to Arizona.”
“Oh—well——Could she go?” asked Helen pointedly.
“Perhaps. Maybe it can be arranged,” Ruth said reflectively.
She seemed to wish to lead the attention of the other two from the mystery of the girl she had observed on the ledge. But Helen, who knew her so well, pinched Ruth’s arm and whispered:
“I believe you know who it was, Ruthie Fielding. You can’t fool me.”
“Sh!” admonished her friend, and because Ruth’s influence was very strong with the black-eyed girl, the latter said no more about the mystery just then.
Ruth Fielding’s influence over Helen had begun some years before—indeed, almost as soon as Ruth herself, a heart-sore little orphan, had arrived at the Red Mill to live with her Uncle Jabez and his little old housekeeper, Aunt Alvirah, “who was nobody’s relative, but everybody’s aunt.”
Helen and her twin brother, Tom Cameron, were the first friends Ruth made, and in the first volume of this series of stories, entitled, “Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill,” is related the birth and growth of this friendship. Ruth and Helen go to Briarwood Hall for succeeding terms until they are ready for college; and their life there and their adventures during their vacations at Snow Camp, at Lighthouse Point, at Silver Ranch, at Cliff Island, at Sunrise Farm, with the Gypsies, in Moving Pictures and Down in Dixie are related in successive volumes.