“I hope that you will let me be your friend,” Madge Peterson said. “I sincerely believe that you have a talent for drawing which ought to be cultivated, and if Mrs. Friend is willing I would like you to come to the city every Saturday morning and attend the Art Institute.”
“Miss Peterson!” Eva cried, with glowing eyes. “How wonderful, wonderful that would be!”
“We’ll have beautiful times,” Madge exclaimed, “and I feel sure that Adele has a talent which she, too, would like to cultivate, and you could come together.”
“Adele writes verses,” Eva exclaimed joyously. “She can even make up rhymes while she is talking, and—”
“Beg pardon, miss,” a strange voice interrupted. “Would you loan me your boat for half a minute? Mine broke loose and is drifting out into the lake. I’d be back with both of them in no time, and be ever so much obliged.”
Madge, looking up, saw before her a weather-browned, kindly-faced fisherman, and so she replied pleasantly, “Yes, do take the boat. We will not need it for half an hour at least.”
Then, rising, she said to Eva, “Now, Dryad Fern, let us wander about a bit. I want to show you a pretty view from the other side of the island.”
And so it chanced a few moments later, when Adele and Everett arrived on the scene, they could find neither the girls nor the row-boat.
“Well, this is strange!” Everett exclaimed. “But I believe that it will turn out to be as harmless a mystery as the other.”
“Hark!” Adele said. “I hear the girls calling, and there they come now.”