"Don't begin with me," she pleaded. "My thoughts wouldn't cheer anybody up."
But the girls were firm. Eleanor must tell them.
"Oh, very well," she agreed. "I was thinking of 'Forest House' and Mother and Father. I could smell Aunt Dinah's light rolls browning in the kitchen oven, and the ham broiling, and——"
"Oh, please stop, Nellie!" begged Madge huskily.
But Eleanor would not stop. "I was wondering if Mother and Father believed now that Madge and I were drowned!"
Eleanor dropped her head. There was a dreadful silence in the room that made Miss Jenny Ann realize that the girls were near to breaking down. "What were you thinking of, Madge?" she demanded in desperation. Madge could usually be depended on to cheer the other girls.
The little captain shook her head despondently. "I was thinking of my father," she answered, almost under her breath. "I was wishing that I could find him, and that he would take me home."
"Lillian, what are you dreaming about to-night?" Miss Jones questioned next.
Lillian glanced plaintively into the fire. She popped a particularly fat kernel of a walnut in her mouth and chewed it thoughtfully before she replied. Then, still picking at her nuts with a hairpin, she confessed: "I was thinking, Miss Jenny Ann, that, if once I got back home, I would never, never eat another nut, not even at Christmas."
The girls forgot their woes and shouted with laughter.