"I don't know," answered Corinne, "except that Father's had a talk with her. He told me, coming over, that your mother had called him up to-day on the telephone, explained some of the trouble, and asked him to call to-night. He said he himself was going to have an interview with Sarah, and I told him it probably wouldn't do any good. But he said he had something that he thought would convince her ladyship pretty speedily. But he also said I was not to ask him what it was! Some time he might tell me, but not at present. Isn't that mysterious! I really didn't think he'd succeed. He evidently has! Hurrah!"
"But what can he have said to Sarah that would make her change around so!" marveled Margaret.
"I'm sure I can't imagine!" cried Corinne. "But never you mind, honey dear! A week from next Friday we step off on the island that was Alison's home! And nothing else matters!"
CHAPTER XVIII
TWO SURPRISES
"It seems awfully queer to me," remarked Bess, sitting in the Charlton Street parlor one afternoon in May, reading a recently received letter with a foreign postmark, "that Margaret says absolutely nothing at all, lately, about whether they've done any work in hunting up clues to the sapphire signet mystery!"
"Neither does Corinne," added Jess, looking over a similarly marked letter that she held. "They've neither one mentioned the subject since they sent up that snap-shot of the Tobacco Rocks some weeks ago. Corinne said then that they'd driven to see them one day, and she had 'snapped' them for our special benefit, because Alexander had discovered that it was from there the stolen gunpowder was shipped. I don't think they had much, if anything, to do with our affair, so I wasn't so much interested in them. I never felt at all convinced that those two happenings had any connection whatever."
"Nor I, either!" agreed Bess. "I wonder whether they have looked up anything about Alison, or whether they've been having such a good time that they've forgotten it completely! My! but I envy them! Here we are in this mussy, foggy, chilly, wretched city,—grubbing along at high, without even time to have a game of basket-ball, lately! And listen to what Margaret says of their surroundings:
"'You never saw such blue, blue water in your life! And the weather's so warm that Corinne and her father have been in bathing several times! I never saw any one swim before! Corinne swims beautifully! It is so lovely in this place that I'm sure Heaven couldn't be any more beautiful. I begin to feel so much stronger! I'm out every day and all of the day! Isn't that wonderful—for me! Mr. Cameron says he feels like a new being, too. We are going to stay two weeks longer, because it's doing us all so much good.'"