“And the rings are too sweet for anything; aren’t they, really?”
“But what are they for—those seven marks, I mean? I heard Mrs. Bonnell mention it, but there was so much going on that I’ve forgotten.”
“Oh, Alice! Don’t you recall that those seven ‘marks’, as you call them, are the seven points of the law of the Camp Fire Girls?”
“To which delightful organization we now belong,” added another of the quartette.
“Oh, Natalie!” exclaimed Alice Lathrop, “you’re a dear, but you always did have the most remarkable remembrancer,” and, with a laugh she put her arms around her chum, whose dark, olive-tinted complexion, with that calm brow, and eyes, in the depths of which woodland pools seemed to lie, gave her the appearance of an Indian maid, especially when she plaited her hair in two, long black braids.
“It’s quite symbolic,” went on Mabel Anderson, as she looked at the silver ring on one of the slim fingers of her pretty hand, a hand of which she was perhaps a trifle vain—excusably so, in the opinion of some of her friends.
“And now we are really ‘Wood Gatherers,’” spoke Marie Pendleton. “It’s the first step. I wonder if we will take the others?”
“I intend to,” declared Alice. “It only takes three months to become a ‘Fire Maker,’ and three more to be a ‘Torch Bearer.’”
“Oh, but there are lots of things to do in that time,” sighed Mabel Anderson. “Think of the test of getting two meals for—for you girls!” and she looked with pretended dismay at her three pretty chums. “I—I don’t even know how to peel potatoes!” and she covered her face with her hands.
“It’s time you learned,” declared Marie, who, since the death of her mother kept house, with the assistance of a maid, for her father, and her brother Jack.