“But are they dead, do you think?” asked Belle, sobbing.
“Not much,” declared Ed firmly. “They only threw that in to put Ramsy off their track. You know that account in the Chelton paper claimed that Mrs. Ramsy said she would put the girls in the Reform School when she found them. Now what girl is going to walk into that sort of trap?”
“Wasn’t it good of the poor things to wash all the dishes,” remarked Bess, who was now looking at the clean porcelain on the closet shelves. “If they had only waited we might have hired them, since, for some unknown reason, Nettie has not arrived.”
“And we could have helped them keep out of sight, too,” added Belle, to whom any thought other than that of suicide was a welcome change. “I do wish we could find them! Don’t you think we ought to search, before they get away—to the ocean?”
“Now, my dear young ladies,” began Ed, assuming a comical air, “since I am to be head waiter, steward and all but butler here, I insist that the thought of foreign affairs, tinged with suicide and desperation, be tabooed from—our midst,” and he actually opened the piano. “Please get your partners for——”
But the melody he struck up was not intended for a dance. It was the old, familiar: “No Place Like Home!”
In something between a wail and a howl, the three boys took up the refrain, and kept at it until the girls begged them to stop. Then Ed fell in a heap on Walter’s neck, and the two foolish young men pretended to cry, and moaned aloud without pretense.
Jack found a big dishpan and he struck up a tattoo on that with a carving knife and fork. Cora was not going to let the boys make all the noise so she procured the dinner bell and rang it violently.
When the din subsided, the boys suggested that the windows be opened, and the place aired before the arrival of the train that was to bring to Lookout Beach Mrs. Robinson and Miss Steel.
What fun it was to be in actual possession of a house!