The sun, red and glorious at the last, had gone down; but, while the campers, seated in a circle about the two dish-towels that Mrs. Crane had spread for a cloth, were eating their ample and delicious meal, the sky was so wonderful and the lake so marvelous with its calm surface touched lightly to burnished copper, that the castaways all but forgot that they were castaways, until Mr. Black brought them back to earth.
"There's only one thing that troubles me," said he, "and that's the mothers and grandmothers and Aunty Janes that we left in Lakeville."
"Yes," agreed Mrs. Crane, pouring a second cup of cocoa for Bettie, "they're sure to worry. No matter how far we've gone in the Whale, we've always been home by bedtime."
"And I can't recall," said Mr. Black, running his fingers through his thick, iron-gray hair, "that I told a single soul exactly where I was going."
"And none of the rest of us knew," retorted his sister. "I've said, a great many times, that your fondness for surprising us would get us into trouble some day, and it has."
"But it's pretty nice trouble," offered Bettie, the peacemaker. "Of course all our grown-ups will worry, because grown-ups always do, anyway. But I'm sure they'll remember that you've never lost any of us yet, or starved us, or let us freeze."
"Granny will think," assured Henrietta, giggling at the thought, "that we're staying at a hotel, waiting for repairs on the Whale. She always thinks of hotels as a safe refuge for the homeless—she couldn't imagine a spot without a convenient hotel."
"Well, if nothing rescues us to-night," promised Mr. Black, "I'll walk to Barclay's Point at six to-morrow morning and hail that fish-boat. It leaves Lakeville six times a week at daybreak."
Their meal ended, the castaways sat in a circle about the big driftwood fire that Mr. Black built on the beach. Even Ambrosial Delight enjoyed the unusual evening. He ran round and round the group, just at the edge of the darkness, chasing nocturnal insects or the shadows cast by the flickering firelight; and once, greatly to his own surprise and to the campers' amusement, he leaped from a jutting log into the smooth, glassy lake. After that surprising experience, he was willing to lie cuddled in Henrietta's lap.
When it became evident that nobody could stay awake any longer, Mrs. Crane tucked all her little charges—even to the kitten—away for the night.