Sadie smiled and executed her best bow, then drew herself up to look as tall as “Miss” Sadie should be; but the rest of the evening her eyes and ears were so busy that for once her tongue was silent. She vowed to herself that she would give her mother no peace until she—Sadie—was a really truly Camp Fire Girl like these.
When in the last hour they were all gathered on the floor before the fire, Mary Hastings asked, “Miss Laura, have you decided yet what our special work is to be—the ‘service for somebody else’?” she added with a glance at the words over the mantelpiece.
“That is for you girls to decide,” Laura returned. “Have you any suggestion, Mary?”
“I’ve been wondering if we couldn’t help support some little child—maybe a sick child in a hospital, or an orphan.”
“Gracious! That would take a pile of money,” objected Louise Johnson, “and I’m always dead broke a week after payday.”
“There are fifteen of us—it wouldn’t be so much, divided up,” Mary returned.
“Sixteen, Mary—you aren’t going to leave me out, are you?” Miss Laura said.
“I think it would be lovely,” cried Bessie Carroll, “if we could find a dear little girl baby and adopt her—make her a Camp Fire baby.”
“Huh!” sniffed Lena Barton. “If you had half a dozen kids at home I reckon you wouldn’t be wanting to adopt any more.”
“Right you are!” added Eva Bicknell, who was the oldest of eight.