“I’m sure it’s safe,” Barbara told her again, for times beyond counting, “and maybe you could get it in the contest after all,” she cheered the little lady.
“I’d love to. It is so handsome! Well, you’ve done your best and I’m getting more fond of you every day,” declared the dainty little Miss Davis, with a pardonable show of affection for her little sampler relation.
Barbara loved that feeling of relationship, however remote it was, for she had been much alone since her Aunt Katherine moved away out West, and there was after that no woman but the well-meaning Dora to offer her protection. It was all well enough to be considered different from other girls, to have her father tell her gallantly that she was almost as good as a boy, to have boys call her a pal and a chum and flatter her in their favorable comparisons, not a bit like other girls; but a girl needs a woman’s sure arm around her; sometimes.
She wants to be told she just must not do things she insists upon doing. In a word she cannot comfortably carry all her own responsibility. And Barbara knew this well. She had tried it out and found the way very lonely. It would be such fun now to have the Twinnie Davises to run to. Cousins, she would call them of course.
It so happened that this was the week that Dudley Burke and Glenn Gaynor left for camp. So much always happens in the late summer. The night before they left the boys took all the girls out, all the girls that the girls could gather up. And they had a wonderful time, from sodas at Hills, to movies at the Ritz, after which delightful hours were spent upon the porch of a Monmouth hotel, where the party too young and too informal to take part, listened to the orchestra and watched the dancing, from the great ocean-front porches. In a few more years they might take part in this, but just this summer Mrs. Burke was acting as chaperon and they were glad to be allowed to look on. Otherwise the party might not have remained so late on the wonderful hotel porch; that is, they could not have done so but for the all-important chaperonage.
Friday morning came at last, and they were going in search of that camp in the woods.
“I’m so thrilled,” Cara confessed, “I can hardly breathe. I think I have real heart disease.”
“Not exactly heart disease,” said Dr. Hale, “but curiosity illness. It has a choking habit.”
Babs, Cara, and Dr. Hale were in Cara’s touring car, and she was driving. The dignified doctor tried to spread himself all over the back seat; for the two girls, of course, were together in front. They were going to Cosmo Woods. Captain Quiller had not only given them full and detailed directions, but he had drawn them a map of the outlying territory.
“You could easily tell he was a sailor,” commented Barbara. “Just look at the lines. They’re like the zone lines in an old geography.”