“Most amazing thing you ever heard of! It was last Saturday night. I had four fellows from the fraternity here for the week-end, and about nine o’clock we all piled into the boat and went over to the Royal Hotel to dance. There happened to be a bunch of girls staying there that we knew, so we were sure of a swell time. The whole gang from Shady Nook went across too—the Reed family, the Partridges, the Robinsons—practically everybody except the Flicks. So you see Shady Nook was deserted.
“We danced till around twelve o’clock and had something to eat. Then the fellows suggested we all get into the launch and go for a ride. Mother was game: she went along too, and so did a couple of the girls. By the time we took them back to the hotel and came home, it must have been two o’clock.”
“Hadn’t you seen any flames?” interrupted Jane. “From the river, I mean?”
“Not a flicker! But we had been motoring in the other direction, and you know the hotel isn’t right across from our bungalow, so we shouldn’t have been likely to notice when we were dancing. What wind there was blew the other way.”
“Even when you reached your own dock, didn’t you smell smoke?” demanded Mary Louise.
“Yes, we did then. But the flames were all out. The bungalow was gone—but the trees hadn’t caught fire.”
“That was queer,” remarked Mrs. Gay. “Unless somebody put out the fire.”
“Nobody did, as far as we know,” replied Clifford. “But it was out all right. And the bungalow gone, all but the foundation stones!”
“What in the world did you do?” asked Jane.
“Went over to the Partridges’—they’re the people who live next to us on the other side,” he explained to Jane. “Fortunately they were still up, but they hadn’t noticed the smoke for the trees; they had been at the dance themselves till about one o’clock. Well, they gave Mother their one extra bedroom, and we fellows slept in the living room. That was O.K., but it was pretty ghastly, losing everything at once. Especially the clothes and things that belonged to our guests. If it was going to happen, I don’t see why it couldn’t have burned down when we didn’t have any company.”