"I wish you could stay, too, but if you can't, you can't. I'm ever so grateful to you for coming. I can tell you right now that there aren't many people I'd trust my girls to, as I did with you!"
"I know it's a compliment, Nell, so you needn't talk about gratitude. I'm the one to be grateful, I'm sure. The more experience I get before I'm a regular Guardian myself, the better chance I'll have to make good when the time comes."
"I'm ever so glad you feel that way about it, Anna. You know, there are ever and ever so many girls who could do the work, and won't try. I'm not sure that it's so much 'won't' as—oh, I don't know! I think they're afraid—they haven't any confidence in themselves. They think it would be absurd for them to try to direct others. I felt that way myself."
"Nearly everyone who is at all likely to make good does, Anna. That's the strangest part of it. When I hear a girl talking about how easy it is to be a good Guardian, 'and how sure she is that she'll make good, I'm always afraid she's going to fail. If you make the girls understand they've got to help you, and that you know that if they don't you won't be able to succeed, you get them ever so much more interested."
"That's easy to understand. It makes them feel that they really do have a part in the work. I noticed that about your girls, particularly, Nell. They seemed to feel that they were all a part of the Camp Fire."
"Well, that's the spirit I've always tried to put into them. I'm very glad if I've really succeeded in doing it. It was a good deal of a trust for me, as well as for them—leaving them to you. It shows, I think, that the Camp Fire is in good shape and able to get along, not exactly by itself, but under different conditions. I might easily have to leave them, you know, and if they couldn't go right ahead under another Guardian, I'd feel that my work had been, in a way, at least, a failure."
"All ready, Miss Drew!" called old Andrew, and then the girls gathered on the beach and sung the Wo-he-lo song as the boat glided off.
Eleanor welcomed the quiet days that followed, during which she completed the plans for the field day in which the Boy Scouts were also to take part, and for the long tramp she planned as the chief event of the summer for her girls.
"It seems sort of slow, now that those gypsies have gone, and there's no one to make trouble for us," Dolly complained. But Bessie and Zara, who heard her, only laughed at her.
"You'd better be careful," said Zara. "First thing you know you'll be starting some new trouble."