“I am just crazy about going,” returned Virgie. “Come out into the kitchen, Jo; the boys are out there. They are dyeing eggs for the wounded soldiers at the hospital. We’re letting them get through first and then they will help us do ours.”
Joanne followed Virgie rather timidly. Winnie was already in the midst of the company. “Here’s Jo, girls and boys,” announced Virgie. “It’s Jo Selden, boys, and she has brought all these lovely eggs from that spot in the country we have been telling you about.”
“It must be a corking place,” remarked the boy nearest Joanne. “Tell us about it, Jo. Gee whiz! but you’re lucky to have a cousin like that.”
“Yes, tell us, Jo,” spoke up two or three others. “We want to hear all about it, for we’re looking for a place to camp, and we thought maybe we Boy Scouts could find favor in your cousin’s sight so he’d let us in on the ground floor, as it were.”
“It surely would be ground floor,” returned Joanne, and before she knew it she was chattering away to half a dozen at once, waxing eloquent on the subject of the lodge, the river and all the rest of it.
“Ye gods and little fishes!” exclaimed Chet Lacey, “I never heard of such attractions all in one spot. It makes me fairly squirm with envy. I say, boys, we’ve just got to see it, if we do no more than wriggle inside the first fence. We’ve all got to be awfully nice to Joanne so she will tell Mr. Pattison what a fine lot we are. Miss Selden, won’t you allow me to escort you to a chair? Do you feel too warm? Shall I fan you? Are you chilly? Do permit me to get you a shawl or something.”
Of course Joanne had to dimple and laugh at this nonsense, but it made her feel perfectly at home with these unaffected boys, so that before long she was as merry as the rest.
“Where’s Claudia?” she asked as she realized that their patrol leader was not present.
“She’ll be here in a minute,” Virgie told her. “She is writing a song for the occasion. Watch those blue eggs, Jo; they mustn’t get too dark.”
So Joanne turned her attention to the pan of eggs while the boys carefully ladled out those already done. There were four boys in the party, Chesney Lacey, Miss Chesney’s nephew, better known as Chet, Milton Seymour, Peter Lowe and Hal Fosdick. A great deal of chaffing went on, but the business of dyeing the eggs was not allowed to suffer.