CHAPTER IX[ToC]
A STRANGE MEETING
For several days after the "hunt" the girls kept up the joke on themselves. Time after time they threatened to let Jack, and his friend Percy, guess the truth, but Tavia, the most to be feared, did manage to keep the laugh purely feminine.
Dorothy and Cologne were gathering berries this morning, while Tavia ran off to a spot where she declared she could get the better kind of fruit, better than any they had yet secured. She turned in back of the big barn, then ran over behind the ice-house, and then she smelled apples, ripe apples.
"There are harvest apples around here, somewhere," she told herself. "I simply must find them."
From tree to tree she scampered along until she was out in the lane that ran into the next estate.
"That's a road," she was thinking. "And there's a man."
Glancing around to see if she could discern Dorothy or Cologne, Tavia had a sudden thrill of terror.
"I didn't know I had gone so far," she thought, "and that man is coming this way."