Polly ran to her and threw her arms about the little girl.
"Oh, Ella, darling, what has happened to you?" she cried. "Your father was sure you'd been kidnaped. He came to our house to ask if we had seen you. Are you hungry? How did you ever get here?"
Ella clung to Polly as though she never meant to let her go. In her loneliness and fright she had dreamed of friends coming to rescue her, and these dreams had vanished with her waking. She was half afraid that Polly, too, would fade away and leave her alone again.
"It's really you!" she kept saying over and over. "It's really you!"
The others crowded around her, and Ella laughed and cried and answered questions in a confused way. She had gone rowing, she explained, and had lost her oars and then drifted.
"Daddy was busy and I wanted some fun," she said, holding fast to Polly's hand even as she talked. "I got cook's picnic basket while she was upstairs after lunch, and I packed some things to eat in it. I was going to have a beach party like the one you had. But when I lost the oars I couldn't do anything with the boat, and though I screamed and took off my blouse and waved it, I couldn't make any one hear me or see me."
"How long have you been on Rattlesnake Island?" asked Fred.
"Oh, ever so long," Ella answered confidently. "I was out on the ocean till it was dark, and then just as it was getting light, I felt the boat bump and I jumped out and pulled it ashore. I thought some one might live here, so I started out and walked all around it, but there wasn't a single house!"
"And you were here all alone last night!" commented Margy, pityingly.
"Yes, and it was awfully dark and there were mosquitoes," Ella confided. "I ate up all the lunch, too. And I'm afraid of bugs and snakes and wild animals, so I walked as much as I could till I fell over a tree, and then I was afraid to walk any more."