“I am sure you are very kind,” Polly began in a perfectly unfamiliar tone of voice and manner since she too had known Rose all her life.
“We appreciate your kindness very much,” Eleanor added, fearing that Polly was about to break down.
But Betty Ashton dropped her chin into her hands in her familiar fashion and stared directly at their visitor. “My dear Rose, whatever has happened to you?” she demanded. “Why it’s too absurd! You know you don’t care for anything but parties and dancing and having a good time. You simply haven’t any idea of what it means to be a Camp Fire guardian; why it is difficult enough when you have only to preside at weekly Camp Fire meetings and to watch over the girls in between, but when it comes to living with us and teaching us as Miss McMurtry did last summer——” Betty bit her lips. She did not wish to be discourteous and yet the vision of the fashionably dressed girl before her fulfilling the requirements of their life together in the woods was too much for her sense of humor.
Then suddenly, to Betty’s embarrassment and the surprise of everyone else, Miss Dyer’s eyes filled with tears.
“Please don’t, Betty,” she said a little huskily. “You know, dear, one can get rather tired of hearing one’s self described as an absolute good-for-nothing. Oh, I know I was opposed to your Camp Fire club last summer, but I have watched you more carefully than you dream and have entirely changed my mind. I am not asking you to let me come into your club to help you. I am afraid I am selfish, I can’t explain it to you now, but I want to help myself. Of course I am not wise enough to be your guardian, but I have been talking to Miss McMurtry and she has promised to help me and it is only because you don’t seem able to find anyone else that I dare offer myself.”
At this moment Nan Graham, whom Rose had not seen before, tumbled unexpectedly off her sofa. It was because of her eagerness to reach the other girls. They, at a quick signal from one to the other, had arisen, and now, forming a circle, danced slowly about their new guardian chanting the sacred law of the Camp Fire.
CHAPTER IV
“The Reason o’ It”
“Rose,” Betty Ashton called at about ten o’clock the next morning. Betty was sitting alone before the living room fire, the other girls having gone into town to school several hours before. Books and papers and writing materials were piled on a table before her and evidently she had been working on some abstruse problem in mathematics, for several sheets of legal cap paper were covered with figures.
“Rose,” she called again, and so plaintively this second time that the new guardian of the Sunrise Camp Fire girls hurried in from the kitchen. A gingham apron covered her from head to foot, a large mixing spoon was in one hand and a becoming splash of flour on one cheek.
“What is it, dear?” she inquired anxiously. “Does your foot hurt worse than it did? I ought to have come in to you right away, but Mammy and I have been making enough loaves of bread to feed a regiment and I have been turning some odds and ends of the dough into Camp Fire emblems to have for tea—rings and bracelets and crossed logs. I am afraid I am still dreadfully frivolous!” And Rose flushed, for in spite of Betty’s own problem she was smiling at her. This the Rose who had come to her first Camp Fire Council only a month before in a Paris frock, probably never having cooked a meal for any one in her life!