Meanwhile the greatest of great preparations were being completed at Cragsnook. Only the freest use of telegraph had contented Guy Dunbar to stay with the train that bore him and his famous cousin back to civilization.
The train was in. Michael and Shep met it. Boxer had been compelled to stay home though Michael wanted to take him, and all the girls "with Mrs. Dunbar and Professor Benson stood on the porch, under the arch of growing roses that welcomed the comers to Cragsnook.
"Don't get too excited, Mary," begged Madaline, always to be depended upon for breaking too heavy a silence.
"There they come," shouted Cleo, and nothing but a firm hold laid on her very skirts by Mrs. Dunbar kept the impetuous little scout from running out too near the approaching motor.
Folded in her daddy's arms, Mary seemed for a moment miles and miles away. Then she turned to the girls and tried to speak, but she only managed to say:
"Girls, I am wide awake at last."
"Say, Audrey," said Guy Dunbar, after he had embraced his wife and looked about him at the group of girls, "this surely is a real old home week. I always knew you ought to run a boarding school!"
"Or a merry-go-round, Uncle Guy," Cleo supplemented. "This house, with
Aunt Audrey as leader, has been a regular picnic grounds all Summer."
"And to think I should literally fall over old coz, Jay Dunbar, in a western lumber camp," said jolly Guy Dunbar, thumping his own brilliant head.
Mary and her father (he did look like Guy Dunbar) were too spellbound to notice their surroundings. But as quickly as he could manage it Professor Benson spoke to the wanderer. "It's like the real page in our old log, Dunnie," said the professor, "and your precious Spiranthes Corale has been found. I lost it, but Mary's, friends have recovered it and now you are the famous explorer you set out to become." And he held up the quaint doll with the miraculous green shoot stealing through its arm pit.