Mary Louise smiled: this was just the way she wanted things to be.
The picnic grounds near Cooper’s woods were only a couple of miles from Riverside. A wide stream which flowed through the woods had been dammed up for swimming, and here the boys and men of Riverside had built two rough shacks for dressing houses. The cars were no sooner unloaded than the boys and girls dashed for their respective bath houses.
“Last one in the pool is a monkey!” called Max, as he locked his car.
“I guess I’ll be the monkey,” remarked Elsie. “Because I have a suit I’m not familiar with.”
“I’ll help you,” offered Mary Louise.
They were dressed in no time at all; as usual the girls were ahead of the boys. They were all in the water by the time the boys came out of their shack.
The pool was empty except for a few children, so the young people from Riverside had a chance to play water games and to dive to their hearts’ content. Everybody except Elsie Grant knew how to swim, and Mary Louise and several of the others were capable of executing some remarkable stunt diving.
Before noontime arrived Elsie found herself venturing into the deeper parts of the pool, and, with Kenneth or Mary Louise beside her, she actually swam several yards. All the while she was laughing and shouting as she had not done since her parents’ death; the cloud of suspicion that had been hanging over her head for the past few days was forgotten. She was a normal, happy girl again.
The lunch that followed provided even more fun and hilarity than the swim. It seemed as if their mothers had supplied everything in the world to eat. Cakes and pies and sandwiches; hot dogs and steaks to be cooked over the fire which the boys built; ice cream in dry ice, and refreshing drinks of fruit juices, iced tea, and soda water. Keen as their appetites were from the morning’s swim, the young people could not begin to eat everything they had brought.
“We’ll have enough left for supper,” said Mary Louise, leaning back against a tree trunk with a sigh of content.