"We will have one more jolly old evening together, anyhow," said Bradley. "I'll go out and get the firewood now." But when supper was over, and the two trunks stood in a corner, packed and strapped for their morrow's journey, nobody seemed in a mood for romping. The boys squatted on the hearth-rug as solemnly as Indians around a council-fire. As the shadows danced on the ceiling, Betty reached down from the low stool where she sat, to stroke the puppy stretched across her feet.
"What do you all want me to bring you from Europe?" she asked, playfully. "Pretend that I could bring you anything you wanted. Only remember the story of Beauty and the Beast, and don't anybody ask for a white rose. Molly, you are the oldest, you begin, and choose first."
Molly's gray eyes gazed wistfully into the embers. "Oh, you know that there is only one thing in the whole world that I ever wish for, and that is Dot. But of course she isn't in Europe."
"You don't know," interrupted Lloyd. "I've read of stranger things than that. I have a story at home about a boy that was kidnapped, and yeahs aftah he was found strollin' around in a foreign country with a band of gypsies. They'd taken him across the ocean with them."
"And there's a piece in my Fourth Reader," added Scott, eagerly, "about a child that was stolen by Indians when she was so young that she soon forgot how to talk English. She grew up to look just like a squaw. When the tribe was captured, her own mother did not recognise her. Her mother was an old white-haired woman then. But there was a queer kind of scar that had always been on the girl's arm, and when her mother saw that she knew it was her daughter, and she began to sing a song that she used to sing when she rocked her children to sleep. And the girl remembered it, and it seemed to bring back all the other things she had forgotten, and she ran up to her mother and put her arms around her."
"Dot has a scar," said Molly. "I could tell her anywhere by that mark over her eye where the stick of wood hit her."
"S'pose Betty should find her somewhere abroad," said Lloyd, her eyes shining like stars at the thought. "S'pose they'd be driving along in Paris, and a little flower girl would come up with a basket of violets, and Eugenia would say, 'Oh, papa, please stop the carriage. I want some of those violets.' And while they were buying them Betty would talk to the little flower girl, and find out that she was Dot. Of co'se Cousin Carl would take her right into the carriage, and they'd whirl away to the hotel, and aftah they'd bought her a lot of pretty clothes they'd take her travellin' with them, and finally bring her back to America just as if it were in a fairy tale."
"Or Eugenia might find her in New York before we leave," suggested Betty. "You know she wrote that she is hunting, and that her father promised to ask the police force to look, too."
"Joyce is lookin', too," said Lloyd. "Dot is as apt to wandah west as east. There's so many people interested now in tryin' to find her. I do wondah who'll be the one."