Madge Morton's Victory

by Amy D. V. Chalmers

The houseboat girls were in despair. Madge neither ate nor slept. She felt particularly responsible for Tania, as the child had been her special charge and protégé. Madge had been deeply grieved when her friend, David Brewster, had been falsely accused of a crime in their previous houseboat holiday, when they had spent a part of their time with Mr. and Mrs. Preston in Virginia; but that sorrow was as nothing to this, for David was almost a grown boy and able to look after himself, while Tania was little more than a baby. When no news came of either Philip Holt or Tania, Madge began to believe that Philip Holt had accomplished his design. He had managed to shut Tania up in some kind of dreadful institution. The little captain did not believe that they would ever find the child, and was so unhappy over the loss of her Fairy Godmother that she lost her usual power to act.

Phyllis Alden, however, was wide awake and on the alert. She knew that it was not possible for Philip Holt to leave Cape May without some one’s assistance. Some one must know how and when he had disappeared. The whole point was to find that person.

Phil thought over the matter for some time. Then she quietly telephoned to Ethel Swann and asked her to arrange something for her. She made an appointment to call on Ethel the same afternoon, and she and Lillian walked over to the Swann cottage together. It seemed strange to Madge that her two friends could have the heart for making calls, but, as there was absolutely nothing for them to do save to wait for news of Tania that did not come, she said nothing save that she did not feel well enough to accompany them.

As Lillian and Phyllis Alden approached the Swann summer cottage they saw that Ethel had with her on the veranda the two young people who had been most unfriendly to them during their stay at Cape May, Roy Dennis and Mabel Farrar.

Roy Dennis got up hurriedly. His face flushed a dull red, and he began backing down the veranda steps, explaining to Ethel that he must be off at once.

Phyllis Alden was always direct. Before Roy Dennis could get away from her she walked directly up to him, and looking him squarely in the eyes said quietly: “Mr. Dennis, please don’t go away before I have a chance to speak to you. It seems absurd to me for us to be such enemies, simply because something happened between us in the beginning of the summer that wasn’t very agreeable. I wished to ask you a question, so I asked Ethel to arrange this meeting between us this afternoon.”

“What do you wish to ask me?” he returned awkwardly.

Phil plunged directly into her subject. “Weren’t you and Philip Holt great friends while he was Mrs. Curtis’s guest?” she asked.

Roy Dennis looked uncomfortable. “We were fairly good friends, but not pals,” he assured Phil.

“But you, perhaps, know him well enough to have him tell you where he was going when he left Mrs. Curtis’s,” continued Phil in a calmly assured tone. “Mrs. Curtis has not received a letter from him since he left here, so she does not know just where he is. We girls on the houseboat would also like very much to know what has become of Mr. Holt.”