“That’s so! Forgive me, old girl! You did do a fine piece of work—all of you. I’m just sore because the thing turned out so—badly. But what I really meant was that I can’t see how you got mixed up in it at all—from the very beginning, I mean.”
“That’s precisely what we think about you!” laughed Phyllis. “We’ve felt all along as if it were our affair and that you were interfering. So I think we’d better have explanations all around!”
“Well, as a matter of fact, it’s Eileen’s affair, most of all, so I think she’d better do her explaining first,” Ted offered as a solution of the tangle.
They all looked toward Eileen, sitting cowered over the fire, and she answered their look with a startled gaze of her own.
“I—I don’t know whether I ought!” she faltered, turning to Ted. “Do you think I ought?”
“I guess you’d better!” he declared. “It’s got to a point where these folks seem to have some inside information of their own that perhaps might be valuable to you. How they got it, I can’t think. At any rate, there’ll be no harm done by it, I can vouch for that. So—just fire away!”
Thus adjured, Eileen drew a long breath and said hesitantly:
“I—I really don’t know just where to begin. A lot of it is just as much a mystery to me as it is to you. I think you all have heard that I have a grandfather who is very ill, in a hospital over in Branchville. He is the Honorable Arthur Ramsay, of Norwich, England. He has been for many years a traveler and explorer in China and India and Tibet. Early this year he had a severe attack of Indian fever and could not seem to recuperate, so he started for England, coming by way of the Pacific and America. When he got to the Atlantic coast, this last summer, some one recommended that he should try staying a few weeks at this beach; so he took a bungalow and spent part of the summer and autumn here, and thought he was much benefited.”
“Do excuse me for interrupting!” exclaimed Phyllis; “but was the bungalow he rented Curlew’s Nest?”
“Why, yes,” hesitated Eileen, with a startled glance at her “it—it was.”