"Oh!" the sound was a sigh, a gasp, then Mary began to slip down deep into the chair.
"Now, don't you dare faint!" called Madaline, with the magic way she always exercised of averting evil through sheer innocent challenge. "Here, Grace, hold her head while I fetch water," and while Grace attempted to support the head Madaline had been fondling, Mary raised it with a look of unspeakable joy.
"Oh, girls!" she murmured, "how did you do it?"
"Oh, we didn't," disclaimed Cleo. "No girls really could; we just lived up to our laws and rules and inspirations, and all those powers united to bring our happy result. It would be perfectly silly to say girls could do such things."
"But we did all the same," came from Grace, "and it would be sillier to say the rules and the laws and the inspirations did them. Wouldn't it? You wrote the whole story and even sent Mary's picture to your uncle."
"But daddy!" Mary begged. "Tell me, where is he now? How did your uncle find him?"
"Our uncle," corrected Cleo. "I am almost afraid to tell you this part. The girls will say I was in the secret all the time, and I wasn't, truly. Mary—you are my cousin!"
"She is not—no fair!" cried Grace, actually slamming a pillow on Cleo's head. "I warned you long ago not to dare to claim her——" And the thumping of soft pillows supplied the omission of words.
"At least let me tell it," said Madaline in mock scorn. "Be generous enough to give us that much glory. You see, ladies and gentlemen (to an imagined audience), this little girl," slamming Cleo with another pillow, "wrote a letter to her cousin. Her cousin had found his cousin, and his cousin made Mary Cleo's cousin, because Cleo's cousin—was——"
Realizing Mary was not in a mood for such joking, Madaline apologized with a kiss on the softly pinked cheek. "Mary-love," she confessed, "I just did that to ward off tears. Cleo would have disgraced the scouts in another moment."