Mollie started to shake her head moodily, thought better of it, and smiled instead.
"I won't be a death's head at the feast," she told herself savagely. "I suppose I'm awfully wicked, but now that they are all so happy, it makes me feel dreadfully lonesome. I'm glad from my very heart for them, of course. But, oh, Paul! Oh, little Dodo! If you will only come back to Mollie, she will never go away from you again, never, never!"
Dinner that night for the other girls was a joyful occasion. The girls dressed up in their prettiest and best, Mrs. Ford and Betty cooked a most appetizing supper, and if it had not been for the one dark cloud still hanging over them, the evening that followed would have been the happiest they had ever spent.
Mollie kept her promise to herself and entered into the gayety with the best of them, and no one—except Betty, perhaps—realized how much she was suffering.
However, when the lights were out that night and everybody but herself was asleep, Mollie's brave barrier broke down and she sobbed miserably into her pillow.
"I want to go home!" she cried, heart brokenly. "I can't keep this up day after day! I can't! If I don't hear some good news soon, I'll die—I know I shall."
Only the sound of the waves pounding angrily on the shore and the shrilling of a rapidly rising wind answered her, and after a while she sank into a troubled, uneasy sleep.
And how could she know as she lay there, restlessly tossing from side to side and muttering incoherently to herself, that the wind and waves were actually sending her an answer which, in her wildest moments, she could never have imagined?
Toward morning something, she could not tell what, roused Betty and she sat up suddenly in bed, every nerve taut, every sense alert.
The wind had increased in fury while they slept, till now it was howling fiercely about the house, rattling the windows and whistling shrilly through the cracks, which together with the pounding of the waves, made an almost deafening uproar.