His brave little girl!
"Dicky?" Ethel murmured, looking up at her father.
"He's all right, dear. Aunt Marion has taken him to the fire."
Then Ethel leaned her face against her father's shoulder and lay without stirring, utterly content.
CHAPTER XX
FOLLOWING A CLUE
WHEN Jo Sampson came running with a glass of hot milk and her Aunt Marion's instructions that Ethel Blue was to drink it at once, he said that he was preparing the launch for an immediate return across the lake. It was after they were packed into the boat and Ethel Brown had squeezed the water out of Ethel Blue's bloomers, that she shrugged herself comfortably into her father's coat and propped herself against his shoulder and asked if anybody knew how it happened.
Nobody did, it seemed. Dicky had gone to walk with Helen and Mary and when they came back and began to busy themselves about the luncheon he had slipped away. It was not until Captain Morton, who had reached Chautauqua a day earlier than he expected, and had followed them across in another launch, suddenly arrived and asked for Ethel Blue that they noticed that both Ethel Blue and Dicky were missing. The first point of search was the neighborhood of the rowboat where Ethel Brown had left her, and they must have come upon her only an instant after she had collapsed, for Dicky complained tearfully that "The hurted me and then the tumbled down."