“I don’t know whether you allow an outsider to come into one of your meetings,” the intruder began, dropping into a near-by chair.
From her place on the sofa Nan Graham lifted her head. She alone of the little company did not know their visitor’s name. She saw a young woman of about twenty-six or seven with light golden brown hair and eyes with the same yellow lights in them, dressed in a lovely crepe evening gown with a bunch of roses at her belt and a scarf thrown over her shoulders. Nan’s eyes glowed with a momentary forgetfulness, having long cherished just such an ideal and never before seen it realized.
But Betty only shook her head, answering with little enthusiasm:
“Oh, it doesn’t matter this evening, Rose, you may stay if you like, though we don’t generally have strangers at our meetings.” And then, though she usually had good manners, Betty fell to studying the dancing lights in the fire without making any further effort at conversation. She had no desire to be rude, but it was trying to have Rose Dyer, her mother’s intimate friend, the one older girl, held up as a model for her to follow, who had done her best to prejudice Mrs. Ashton against the Camp Fire plan the summer before, come into their midst at an hour when their very existence as a club seemed to be in peril.
For a few moments Miss Dyer waited without trying to speak again. Although Polly and Esther were both endeavoring to make themselves agreeable, the atmosphere of the drawing room continued distinctly unfriendly.
“I—I am afraid I am in the way although you were kind enough not to say so,” Rose suggested, finding it difficult to explain what had inspired her visit with so many faces turned away from hers. “I think I had best go; I only came to ask you a great favor and now——” She was getting up quietly, when Betty with a sudden realization of her duties as a hostess made a little rush toward her and taking both the older girl’s hands drew her into the center of their circle.
“Please forgive our bad manners and do stay, Rose,” she pleaded. “We really have no business to attend to to-night and perhaps company may cheer us up.”
But although Rose, without the least regard for her lovely gown, had immediately dropped down on the floor in regular Camp Fire fashion, apparently she had not heard what Betty had suggested, for straightway her expression became quite as serious as any one else’s.
“You may not care for what I am going to say and you must promise to be truthful if you don’t,” Rose began, as timidly as though she were not ten years older than any other girl in the room, “but I have been hearing for the past two months that you were looking for a Camp Fire guardian to spend the winter with you and I have been wondering——” Here pulling the flowers from her belt she let her gaze rest upon them. “I have been wondering if you would care to have me?”
The silence was then more conspicuous than before and Rose flushed hotly.