“What is the matter, Jess?” shrieked Amy. “You’ve left me to do all the work.”
“Momsy!” gasped out Jessie, looking back for an instant. “She was scared to death that the lightning would strike the house because of the radio aerial.”
Her chum came leaping up the hill behind her, having moored the canoe with one hitch. She cried out:
“No danger from lightning if you shut the switch at the set. You know that, Jessie.”
“But Momsy doesn’t know it,” returned the other girl, and dashed madly into the house.
She had forgotten to tell her mother of that fact—the safety of the closed receiving switch. She felt condemned. Suppose her mother had been frightened by the thunder and lightning and should pay for it with one of her long and torturing sick headaches?
“Momsy! Momsy!” she cried, bursting into the hall.
“Your mother is down town, Miss Jessie,” said the quiet voice of the parlor maid. “She drove down in her own car before the storm.”
“Oh! She wasn’t here when the lightning struck——”
“No, Miss Jessie. And that was some thunder-clap! Cook says she’ll never get over it. But I guess she will. Bill, the gardener’s boy, says it struck a tree down by the water.”