“What did I tell you?” snapped Belle, chagrined at the interruption. “Didn’t I say they had a date with Darry and Burd?”
“Always tagging around,” Sally Moon’s voice reached them, as, without another word, the Radio girls, with Bertha and Henrietta in tow, turned toward the car. “Just like big kids——”
“Sorry we can’t take you all, girls,” called Burd to Belle and her crowd as he shifted the lever to low and the car moved slowly forward. “But, you see, we have a pretty good load as it is.”
Darry introduced the strange lady as Miss Alling, “Aunt Emma,” and the girls were delighted at this opportunity to make her acquaintance. The lady who was to chaperone them on the two weeks’ jaunt to Forest Lodge was not at all the type of person that the inconsequential chatter of the boys had led them to expect.
To be sure, Miss Alling was thin, but hers was not the thinness of the dried-up spinster but rather the slenderness of an athletic woman who has kept herself physically fit. Her face was not handsome, but it was humorously alert and alive. Only around her mouth was a hint of the obstinacy for which Burd gave her credit.
Miss Alling was unmistakably enthusiastic about having the young folks with her at Forest Lodge, greeting them, as Burd had prophesied, as “gifts from heaven.”
When they were nearing Nell Stanley’s house, Jessie suddenly remembered the ice-cream cones they had promised to bring the young ones at the parsonage, and insisted that the boys stop long enough to pay a visit to a convenient candy store.
By that time little Hen was once more becoming an “empty void,” or at least she declared herself to that effect, so the entire party trooped into the store for ice cream.
Later they stopped at the parsonage, but did not stay long as “Aunt Emma” Alling declared herself in a tremendous hurry to get home. But Miss Alling met Nell and gave her in person a cordial invitation to join the party at Forest Lodge.
They saw Henrietta and Bertha to the very door of Mrs. Foley’s shack in Dogtown (for Henrietta had evinced a strong desire to visit her former guardian), thereby arousing a good deal of interest and admiration on the part of the dwellers there. “My, but that Henrietta Haney had come up in the world, with her fine friends, and all. Her ownin’ an island and visitin’ on it and drivin’ around in automobiles and the like. It’s a credit to the neighborhood, she’s getting to be.” So tongues clacked and heads wagged in Dogtown.