“Not for me, thank you,” said Grace, decidedly. “Mollie and I spent the whole afternoon a while ago trying for trout and never caught one.”
“Oh, well,” said Frank, patronizingly, “you just didn’t know how to go about it, that’s all.”
“I tell you what let’s do,” proposed Betty, wading boldly into the fray. “If you boys want to go fishing, go ahead. And while you’re wasting your perfectly good time, we’ll go to see the Old Maid of the Mountains.”
“The what?” asked both boys together, and at their comical look of perplexity, the girls giggled.
They told of their discovery of the little old lady, and, somewhat to the surprise of the girls, the boys evinced a very real interest. And when Betty graphically related the feast they had had in the cabin of the Old Maid of the Mountains, Frank, in an injured tone, declared:
“It wasn’t fair to pull off a party like that without giving us a bid.”
After the boys had started out gayly, promising to bring home at least a dozen fish, the girls set out in a different direction. They felt rather penitent because they had not seen the little old lady for two days and they wondered if she had been frightened at all during the storm. Also they were anxious to see more of her exquisite embroideries.
“It certainly is queer,” marveled Mollie, as they neared the little house on the top of the hill, “that we just happened to run across the little old lady and find out she’s the same one the girl in the Woman’s Exchange told us of.”
The girls agreed that it was, Amy adding something unoriginal to the effect that “it was a pretty small world, after all.”
The girls found the little old woman as gentle and uncomplaining as ever, although they thought they could sense under the calmness of her manner how much she had missed them.