The next moment and two arms were tight about her neck, almost stifling her. Then a voice that could only be Polly O'Neill's, though Betty could not turn her head, was whispering:
"Oh, Princess, Princess, has it been two years or two centuries since we met? And are you as pretty as ever, and do you love me as much?"
A little later, when both girls had laughed and cried in each other's arms, Polly was at last able to explain to Mrs. Ashton that she and her maid had made a mistake in their train and had taken one which did not stop at the out-of-the-way station mentioned in the girls' letters. So they had been compelled to go on further and then to have an automobile to bring them back to Waldheim.
CHAPTER X
An Adventure
"Margaret, if you don't mind, we are going for a walk. Betty has been talking to some girls in the next village about starting a Camp Fire club with six dear little German maidens who make us think of Meg and Mollie when they were tiny. Would you care to come with us?"
Margaret Adams shook her head. She was lying in a hammock under a tree which made a complete green canopy above her head. At no great distance away was the brook where Betty had thought herself in hiding several weeks before, and by dint of keeping very quiet and concentrating all one's senses into the single one of listening, the music of the running water might be heard. The woman in the hammock had no desire for other entertainment. She had been thinking but a few moments before that she had not felt so well or so young in half a dozen years. The three girls, Esther, Betty and Polly, had been laughing and talking not far away from her for the past hour, but she must have been asleep since she had heard no word of what they were saying until Polly's direct question to her.
"I am awfully lazy, Polly dear," she apologized. "You know I have been insisting each day that the next I was going to do exactly what you girls do and try to pretend I am as young as the rest of you. But I have not the valor, and besides you will have a far more thrilling time without a chaperon. Kiss me good-by and take care of pretty Betty." And Margaret Adams waved her hand in farewell to the other two girls.
Since their stay in the German forests she had insisted that the girls treat her as much as possible like one of themselves, that they forget her profession and her age, and as a sign they were all to call one another by their first names.