“So appropriate,” echoed its lucky possessor, smiling like the gayest morning-glory that ever fluttered in a morning gust which awoke it to the sun, “so appropriate that do you know what I’m going to do, girls?” rising on ecstatic tiptoe.
“I know!” nodded fair-haired Betty with the air of a cynic. “You’re thinking of getting Captain Andy to bore a little hole in it and wearing it round your neck for a while. ’Fess, now!”
“Ha! Betty means to insinuate that if a boy’s one idea of owning a thing is to carve a name or initials upon it, a girl’s first thought is to use it to make her look more ‘fetching’—eh?” Sally pointed an accusing finger at Betty. “I wouldn’t be sarcastic if I were you, ‘Holly’!”
“But that’s just what I did think of doing with it,” owned Morning-Glory, subsiding to the soles of her feet again. “With the exception of my Fire Maker’s bracelet,” holding up her rounded right arm, “and my fagot ring, I have little or no jewelry, as the rest of you girls have. If it was only forty or fifty years ago, now, I could wear that beautiful old miniature of my great-grandfather—it’s set in real gold. As I can’t, I’d like to wear this,” gloating over the large silver disc from which Miles had removed the stain of long burial ere he finely engraved or, rather, scratched the girl-owner’s monogram upon it with the sharpest blade of his penknife so skilfully that it really did not mar by incongruity the quaint beauty of the radiating sunburst, having the queer old sun-face, like a microscopic mask in the center.
“Well, I’d wear it as a pendant if I wanted to! I’ve got a thin little silver chain, Jess, that I’ll lend you while we’re here,” volunteered Arline. “Pouf!” blowing scorn on Betty’s sarcastic scruples. “Why! it’s hardly any bigger than the silver medals which some of the high school girls wear in the spring in honor of their boy friends, in athletics, who have won them on the track team or in the high jump or some other event.”
“To be sure! People will only think that I have a friend who came in second in the mile or half-mile at ‘interscholastics.’” Morning-Glory fluttered gaily again upon the highest tendril of joy’s vine. “I paid dearly for being the first to see the old coin,” with a momentary shudder. “Now I may have the pleasure of wearing it to that party which the Twin-Light Tribe is going to give at which we’ll play old-fashioned games—dance old-fashioned dances—all the girls who don’t belong to our ‘Morning-Glory Tribe’ will just keep guessing and guessing as to what sort of new-fangled athletic medal it is!”
CHAPTER XVII
A MONOGRAM ON A COIN
But no Camp Fire Girl or Boy Scout, either, who assembled at the invitation of the Twin-Light Tribe at an hotel upon the mainland of the Massachusetts North Shore, indulged in any wild or random guesses about the large, silver disc, curiously stamped with a sunburst, which rose and fell with the excited breathing of one happy girl of the Morning-Glory Tribe when she put in an appearance at the long-expected party.
The Twin-Light Tribe was an enthusiastic band of Camp Fire Girls who had taken their name from the twin lights, the two golden, saving eyes of a lighthouse guarding their shore.