“What if we couldn’t find our way out, and they had to come and look for us!” pondered Polly. “Only they wouldn’t know where to look!”
“Oh, we’re not lost!” exclaimed David, in what he tried to make a fearless tone; but Polly, as well as he himself, knew it to be a fib, spoken only to hold their fast-going courage.
“Let’s stop a minute, and see if we can’t tell where we are,” proposed Polly, just as if that were not what they had been doing, at brief intervals, ever since they had passed the unfamiliar fountain.
They had come to no satisfactory conclusion, and were still peering sharply into their surroundings, when Polly spied a figure in the path ahead.
“There’s a boy!” she whispered. “We can ask him.”
As the lad approached, something in his easy swing seemed familiar.
“It looks like—” began Polly—“why, it is! Oh, Cornelius!” she cried excitedly, as the light showed the unmistakable features of her friend of the convalescent ward. She sprang forward to greet him.
“Holy saints!” ejaculated Cornelius O’Shaughnessy. “However come you kids out here, this time o’ night?”
They told their story in breathless snatches, omitting only what had brought them hither.