Miss Davis seemed suddenly to have become speechless. Perhaps it was exhaustion, for she must have labored under a heavy strain since discovering the loss of the model, but, at any rate, she was now drooping in the back seat of Cara’s car as if “every friend in the world had deserted her”; that was the way her attitude impressed the girls.
They tried to talk casually but it was a failure as far as Babs was concerned, and when the usual group of urchins surrounded their car, when it was stopped as near to Nicky’s house as Babs wanted Cara to drive, it was a discouraged girl who alighted. Barbara Hale was sorry she had ever bothered about these little foreigners, yet, quickly as that thought darted through her mind, there came another.
What about Nicky saving the lighthouse lamp from darkness during that awful storm? What other boy of his age would have been as brave as he had been then?
“I’ll run over and see if he’s around,” she told Cara and Miss Davis, in real fear that Miss Davis would insist upon going with her. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Over the rough tracks she stumbled. Everything seemed horrid. The air was thick with smoke, there were odors of all kinds, from factory fumes to puddles from rain, left standing in hidden places where even the sun couldn’t find them.
And as she hurried along her opinion of all this had suddenly changed. Yesterday she would have pitied those poor people living in such a disordered place, but today she pitied herself that she had to go through there.
“If I only hadn’t been so foolish,” she kept thinking. “And I’ve missed a lot of good times this summer just by this.”
Presently she called to a group of children. And their answer brought Babs to a sudden stop.
“You don’t mean that the Marcusis have moved away?” she repeated in surprise.
“Yes, Mam, lit out last night,” a small boy told her. “Guess they hadda skip,” he added impishly.