"Oh, she would never go off with a stranger," declared Dorothy over and over again. "Surely our Tavia has more common sense than that."
"But it is so lonely up here—no," Cologne corrected herself, "you are right, of course, Dorothy. She will be back—just as soon as she feels like coming. That's Tavia!"
But they little knew the danger to which the younger girl had unwittingly exposed herself.
No wonder Tavia could not be found within or without the precincts of the camp.
CHAPTER XI[ToC]
WHEN THE BOYS CAME
Dorothy had always loved her cousins, Ned and Nat, but when they arrived at the camp, the day after Tavia's disappearance, she fancied she had never before fully appreciated them. They came in the Firebird, their automobile, and declared that they would camp out in the open Maine woods, cook in the open, make soups of lily bulbs, stirred with the aromatic boughs of the spruce, and otherwise conform to all the glorious hardships peculiar to the pioneers—according to the stories told by said pioneers.
But the absence of Tavia put a damper on everything.