“You girls have all the luck, anyway,” Chet wrote to Billie. “Just think—if we had stayed over a few hours we would have seen the wreck too.”
Billie tore the letter up and flung it into the paper basket.
“Luck!” she had murmured, her face suddenly grown white as she gazed out over the water that was brilliantly peaceful once more in the afternoon sunlight. “He calls that luck!”
The boys had promised to return in a couple of weeks and give the girls a regular “ride in the motor boat.” If it had not been for the waifs who had so strangely been entrusted to them, the girls would have looked forward more eagerly to the return of the boys.
As it was, they were too busy taking care of the sweet little girls and beautiful little boy and falling in love with them to think much of the boys one way or another except to be deeply thankful that they had escaped disaster in the storm.
And then, when Billie had nearly forgotten that strange impression she had had in the beginning of having seen the children before, suddenly she remembered.
It was one night after the girls had gone to bed. They had been laughing over some of the cunning things the children had been doing, and Laura had been wondering how they would go about finding the relatives of the children—if they had any—when suddenly Billie sat up in bed with a look of astonishment on her face.
“Girls,” she cried, “I know where I saw those children.”
“Oh, where?” they cried, and then held their breath for her answer.
“In Miss Arbuckle’s album!”