“But not from helpless girls!” Marjorie protested.
“I should say not! I wish instead that we had been near enough to come to your rescue. Here we were comfortably enjoying ourselves at a smoker—I recall the night, it had been such a disagreeable day—and we—” The rise of the curtain put an abrupt end to his sentence. “I hope the show is good,” he concluded, turning his attention to the stage.
When Marjorie later repeated the conversation to Ethel, she admitted that she had abandoned the idea of these young men being guilty. They might be silly and frivolous, but at least they had not set out to be mean. The alibi of the smoker was conclusive proof.
But although she dismissed her suspicion concerning the two young men, she did not find that she liked them any better as the time passed. And much to her dismay the consensus of opinion was to delay the stay in the city another day on account of inclement weather. Marjorie and Ethel were the only ones opposed to the plan.
“But it brings our surplus time down to five days!” she protested. “And we’ve only gone half way.”
“But nothing will go wrong,” argued Florence. “And that is what we have our extra time for—to rest during bad weather.”
“But the weather isn’t very bad,” remarked Ethel. “It may be lots worse than this farther on.”
“Well, no matter what it is like we will start on our way tomorrow.”
“That reminds me,” said Daisy, “Mr. Cryton told me of a new short-cut to the Lincoln Highway. If we follow his directions, we can save from two to three hours.”
Marjorie looked up hopefully at this piece of news; indeed it seemed now as if her main object in life were to save time. If these young men suggested the means to accomplish this, they were not so useless after all.