Then they parted, going in different directions. Carol’s thoughts were happy ones as she tripped along through the village and out on the Lake Road.
She smiled to herself as she thought of the merry group of girls she had just left. Carol had dreaded coming to this strange place, fearing that she would be very lonely, but now she was to be made a member of the Sunnyside Club, and she knew that she would love every one of the girls.
Then her thoughts went back over all that had happened in the past month. There had been the beautiful home in a suburb of Chicago, for her father had been a prosperous lawyer, then, for reasons which she never understood, there had been a heavy financial loss, everything they possessed had been sold, and they had moved to the farmhouse which had been her father’s boyhood home, on the Lake Road just out of the town of Sunnyside.
She liked to think of her father as a barefoot boy swinging on the gate which she was then approaching. From the very first day she had felt at home in the comfortable brown house which stood in the midst of a rambling apple orchard. The gnarled old trees were a source of endless delight to her seven-year-old brother and sister, David and Dorothy.
As Carol opened the gate, she heard merry, chattering noises which she knew were made by the twins, who, hidden in the branches, were pretending that they were birds.
As she walked up the gravelly path, the youngsters slid down a near-by apple-tree and pounced upon her.
“You promised to play with us when you came home from school,” David cried, “and I want to choose the game,” he hurried to add.
“Why, David Lorens!” his twin sister cried indignantly. “You know it isn’t your turn to choose a game. You chose yesterday and so it is my turn.”
“Tut! Tut! Children!” Carol laughingly admonished. “Climb up in the tree again and be happy little birds until I come out, and then we three will do something ever so interesting.”
Carol little dreamed that the something that they were to do would make a wonderful change in her life.