Secretly, Dolly was glad. She had enjoyed much of her stay at Camp Crosstrees, but she had about concluded that "roughing it" was not altogether to her taste. She had liked the gay parties round the camp fires, the swift motor-boat trips and the jolly picnic feasts, but she was not enthusiastically fond of long tramps up and down mountains and the deprivation of many home comforts and luxuries. She said no word of this to her kind hosts, but she welcomed the day that would take her back to her own people and their usual summer abode.
Also there had been really unpleasant experiences, from her lonely first night to that last awful night in the woods, and though these things were nobody's fault, they remained in Dolly's memory as decidedly undesirable pictures of her mountain trip.
Dotty Rose, all unconscious of Dolly's secret feelings, realised only that they had had lots of gay times together and many occasions of rollicking camp-life fun. Having spent many summers at Camp Crosstrees, the Rose family had become attached to the place, and always looked forward with eager anticipation to each successive trip.
Unlike Dolly, Bert Fayre loved it all. To him, roughing it was fun, and he cared nothing at all for the city comforts that were missing. He tramped the woods and went fishing, swimming and boating with the same enjoyment of these sports that Bob Rose felt, and he was more than delighted when Mrs. Rose invited him to spend the rest of August at the camp while the girls went for their two weeks at the seashore.
So on the day of departure Dotty and Dolly bade good-bye to their brothers and to Mrs. Rose and Genie, and in care of Mr. Rose started for New York and thence down to Surfwood, a resort on the New Jersey coast, where the Fayre family were staying at a hotel.
"Oh, don't you just hate to leave it?" exclaimed Dotty as the motor-boat took them swiftly down the lake. "Good-bye, you dear old woods; good-bye, you lovely lake. I shan't see you again till next summer."
For, as the children must begin school early in September, both families would return to Berwick in about a fortnight.
Dolly did not entirely share Dotty's enthusiasm, but she realised the wonderful beauty of the scene as she looked back at the lake with its wooded shores and hills rising to the high mountains.
"It is splendid!" she said, very honestly, as she gazed at the beautiful landscape. "I'm afraid, Dot, that you won't have a good time down at Surfwood. It's awfully different, you know."
"'Course I'll have a good time, if I'm visiting you. But, you see, we were a whole month later than usual coming up here this summer, and now to cut two weeks off the other end makes an awfully short season for dear old Crosstrees. Why do they call it Surfwood, Dolly; are there any woods there?"