“We won’t take ‘No’,” cried Billie. “We are depending on you to show us a good place for our picnic and you can guide us over the last of the road to the station. You see, we have a reason for asking you. We want your help.”
The mountain-girl was therefore persuaded to remain with them for the rest of the trip, and presently they drew up near a pine forest where there was a little stream. Ben lifted out the luncheon hamper and the tea basket, and while the girls unpacked the food, Phoebe stood shyly by and watched the proceedings. With a heightened color she glanced from Billie’s and Elinor’s neat skirts and pongee blouses to her own faded calico dress. She spread out her brown fingers stained with berry juice, and looked at them sadly. Then her face brightened.
“I was almost forgetting,” she said out loud, but to no one. “I am always in too great a hurry. I have waited a long time and now it is beginning to come. It was too soon last summer, but now at last it is time.”
Dr. Hume noticed Phoebe talking to herself and shook his head.
“Too much alone,” he thought.
Meanwhile, Billie, piling sandwiches on the lunch cloth, was busy thinking of something far different. Her glance shifted from Dr. Hume to Phoebe and back again. She closed her eyes and the thought which at first she saw dimly in the dark recesses of her mind advanced to the open, took form and shape and presently boldly showed itself as a full-grown plan. Billie, sitting abstractedly on the ground, piling and re-piling the sandwiches, was startled by Ben’s rather impatient voice.
“I’ll have to fall-to unless you give the word, Billie; I’m famished.”
“Excuse my absent-mindedness, Ben,” laughed Billie. “I had just thought up a wild, though perfectly feasible scheme, and I couldn’t turn my mind to mere food for a moment.”
“And the scheme is?” demanded Elinor, seating herself at the lunch table while she waited for the water to boil.
“I shall have to wait to tell you until it’s ready to serve up,” answered Billie, “nice and brown and done through.”