She looked warm and dejected, and Claire stopped the car and asked the young newspaper woman if she cared to ride with them.
Mabel accepted with very little enthusiasm, remarking as she did so that she had to be back at the office at a quarter before six.
When they reached Camp, Rosanna slipped her hand in Claire's and said coaxingly, "Claire dear, I want to see your father all by himself. Will you mind?"
"A secret?" asked Claire, laughing. "Dear me, how exciting this is! Shall I ever know what it is about?"
"If you are a good girl perhaps," said Rosanna, skipping toward the Colonel's office. When she found herself seated facing Colonel Maslin across the big flat-top desk, her courage failed her for a minute, then she plunged into the story.
"I don't know if I have done right or not, Colonel Maslin," she said. "All I thought was that Claire is a Girl Scout and we are bound to help each other. And I did not stop to ask anyone's advice."
"What can it be?" said Colonel Maslin, smiling.
"Claire told me about her mother," resumed Rosanna. "And what she is afraid of, you know; and I felt as though there must be some way to help. So Sunday morning, you know, we went to church; and I just sat there and thought and thought, and then I prayed. I did not hear a word of the sermon, but right away Doctor Ford just shouted at me, and asked if I had been trying to do anything. And that I had better had if I expected God to help me. But even then I didn't know what to do. When we were writing letters after dinner, it all came to me. You know the little Gwenny I told you about, and the doctor in Cincinnati who made her perfectly well?
"Well, I wrote him a letter right then. I asked him to please cure Mrs. Maslin as soon as he had time, because Claire is a Girl Scout. This afternoon Doctor Branshaw telephoned me. He says he can't go ahead and take care of Mrs. Maslin unless you tell him to. He can't have anything to do with it at all unless you say so. But he knows the doctor where Mrs. Maslin is, so he went up to see her and he asked me if I knew how long since Mrs. Maslin fell."
"She never had a fall," said Colonel Maslin positively.