Nothing could be told about the box of jewels. They were all there apparently in a glittering bunch with the card laid on top.
“Dear me, I’m sorry that combination lock broke,” exclaimed Billie. “I don’t mind Belle Rogers looking through my clothes if it gives her any satisfaction, but I would just as soon she hadn’t looked into this box of jewels. And we can’t explain to her, because we mustn’t seem to know that she was capable of doing anything so low and common as to go through my suit case.”
She dressed herself hastily in a pretty white frock. Her smooth rolls of hair and trim braid did not need re-arranging, and she hurried downstairs to the desk with the troublesome box, which she gave into the charge of the clerk.
“These are some really valuable things,” she said. “Will you put them in your safe?”
The clerk wrapped the box up neatly in heavy brown paper, sealed it with red sealing wax, labelled it with her name and address and deposited it in the safe.
“That’s off my mind,” she said, giving a sigh of relief, just as the elevator door opened and Miss Campbell appeared with the other girls.
“Cousin Helen, you’re a dream,” cried Billie, taking her cousin’s arm. “You are like a young girl whose hair had gone and turned white in a single night.”
“Thank you, my dear, but you may be sure that if anything happened which could make my hair turn white in a night, it wouldn’t leave me any girlish looks. But why didn’t you come to my room and let me have a look at you? Are you all exactly right and in place? That’s a sweet little frock. I suppose you got it in Paris last summer. You and your father are a pair of children shopping together, I imagine. All my girls look sweet,” she added, not wishing to wound any feelings by admiring one more than another. “See this lovely dress my little Mary is wearing. Could anything be more exquisitely made than that? Your mother is a wonderful woman, child. There’s nobody like her in West Haven.”
At dinner there was another surprise for the girls. This time it was an agreeable one: four extra places at the table, and presently they were joined by four West Haven boys, looking rather embarrassed but quite happy as they shook hands with the fairy godmother of the party, Billie’s Cousin Helen.
Two of the boys we have met before, Ben Austen and Charlie Clay. The other two were their intimate friends and boon companions, Americus Brown, Nancy’s brother, known as “Merry Brown,” and Percival Algernon St. Clair, whose mother’s fancy had run riot in naming her only child. He was called “Percy” by his friends for short.