The girls gazed after her unhappily.
"Did you ever!" gasped Mollie.
"I didn't mean to make her feel bad. Betty, of all people!" said Amy, conscience stricken. "And of course she's right about our trying to cheer up. Only, I don't want to, someway."
"Betty's a darling," said Mollie thoughtfully. "But of course she can't quite realize how badly we feel. If it were her little brother and sister, now—"
And so gradually Betty came to feel herself more or less of an outsider with these girls who were so close to her. And it was all because they misunderstood her effort to cheer them up and thought she could not feel for them because nothing terrible had happened to her yet.
"I'll show them," she told herself fiercely, "if anything should happen to Allen—" But she shivered and turned away shudderingly from the thought. Allen—if only she could see him for five minutes—just five minutes—
Some way the days dragged through until a week passed, then part of another. Still there had been no clue to the whereabouts of the twins, nor any further news of Will.
"And this is the wonderful vacation we planned!" said Grace with a wry smile, breaking one of the long silences that had become common with the Outdoor Girls these days.
They were, as usual, sitting on the sand and trying to occupy their minds with sewing or reading, yet always with an eye to the road in readiness to rush to their red-headed combination of delivery boy and postman whenever he saw fit to put in an appearance.
Betty opened her mouth to say something, but closed it again. She had learned that any suggestion she might make would be wrongly interpreted by the girls who were engrossed in their own troubles, and so she had wisely decided to say nothing.