Cleo laughed triumphantly. "There, I knew I would get you excited——"
"Cleo Harris!" shouted Madaline, almost forgetting the presence of a sick person out on the enclosed side porch, where Reda was being fixed up for her journey over the mountain. "Cleo," repeated Madaline, "you tell us instantly what your Uncle Guy said!"
"Your commands are my pleasures," replied Cleo in mock dramatic emphasis. "There, doesn't that sound like a book? Uncle Guy wrote to me and to Aunt Audrey, and he merely said not to let a single kid escape. That my letter had knocked him silly, and that his cousin, whom he discovered out in the western camp, was coming home with him."
"Who is the cousin?" asked Grace.
"A man, a lovely man, just like Uncle Guy. He was an explorer, or still is, and has been away for some years," she glanced rather anxiously at Mary, but the latter never changed her serious expression. Then Cleo said pointedly, "Mary, your father was an explorer, wasn't he?"
"Yes, he went away in search of orchids," faltered Mary, "and you know he never came back from the sea, when the men took him out to the ocean to cool him in that frightful fever."
"And you left the island with the professor a few days after?" pressed
Cleo.
"Yes, oh yes. We had to get away. Grandie was getting sick, you know; that is how he lost—his memory."
"Yes," said Cleo, simply, but Grace and Madaline had "seen a light," which Mary still appeared blind to.
Mrs. Dunbar was very busy arranging for the removal of Reda, but in a moment of cessation she was heard talking to Crow's Nest over the phone. She gave orders to the sanitarium that Professor Benson should be brought down to Cragsnook for a ride late that afternoon, as the girls would not go up there that day. Besides, Mrs. Dunbar was declaring, the ride would do him good.