“If I see another window just bursting with candy I’ll die,” said Mabel. “I never saw such windows. I wish I hadn’t left my money in my suitcase.”
“Mr. Black has mine,” said Henrietta. “All but a dime that happened to be loose in my pocket. But I tell you what. We’ll dart into the next candy place and spend that—we can easily catch up. Here, come on in here.”
The clerk, not realizing that the two girls were in a hurry, finished leisurely with another customer before attending to Henrietta who was impatiently tapping the counter with her dime.
“What’s all the rush,” drawled the young man, carefully weighing the pink and white buttercups that Henrietta had chosen. “Catching a train?”
“Yes,” snapped Henrietta. “Don’t bother to tie it up. Come on, Mabel, we must run, now, to catch up. That horrid clerk was dreadfully slow.”
They ran. They caught up with and passed a large number of persons but not with Jean, nor Marjory of the yellow hair, nor Bettie with the bobbing curls nor Mr. Black, who had innocently imagined himself perfectly capable of introducing Chicago to five small maidens from the wilds of Northern Michigan.
He had now lost two of them. He had missed them almost immediately and had turned back to look for them, expecting to find them with their noses against some fascinating window. And now they were well ahead of him, screened from his view by hundreds of busy shoppers and running with might and main.
[CHAPTER II—PREPARATIONS]
And now, of course, you will want to know why a round half dozen of Lakeville’s most precious inhabitants should be discovered parading the streets of Chicago and incidentally losing themselves and each other by the wayside.
It was this way. The Lakeville schoolhouse had burned down, nobody could decide where to build a new one and the places used as temporary substitutes were unsatisfactory to many of the parents. Moreover, Mabel’s father, the village doctor, had long wanted to go to Germany in order to study certain branches of surgery—this was before the war, of course. His wife wanted to go with him but she didn’t wish to take Mabel.