“Why, I can’t quite understand it,” Mollie said aloud, seeing the puzzled group of faces around her. “Mother telegraphs that she and Mr. Wharton, Sylvia’s father, have been engaged to be married for the past few months and that she was coming home to tell us about it and to ask us if we were willing, but something has happened or else Mr. Wharton has just persuaded her, for they are married already and are sailing for home to-morrow. Mother says she is very happy and hopes we will forgive her and be almost as overjoyed as she is in coming home to us. At least that is what I think the cablegram means. Billy was mistaken in thinking it a telegram. How do you feel, Polly dear? I am too dazed to take it all in.”
“I feel,” said Polly, with a return to her old passionate, uncontrolled manner, “that I shall never be happy again as long as I live.” And then observing a slow, hurt look in Sylvia Wharton’s usually unmoved face, she turned for an instant toward her. “I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, Sylvia, or to say anything against your father, but it just isn’t possible for you to understand what this means to me.” And with this thoroughly Polly-like point of view she ran away and hid herself inside the cabin.
Billy Webster walked off with Mollie and the other Camp Fire girls to talk things over, giving Dr. Barton a chance to linger for a few moments with Rose Dyer.
“I don’t know why you seem so offended with me these days, Miss Rose,” that young man was soon saying in rather an humble voice for so stern and upright a judge of other people’s duties, “but may I say that I think your work among the Camp Fire girls this winter has been quite wonderful and that I never dreamed you could or would be interested in anything outside of society? Oh, Rose——”
“Rose of the World,” Rose Dyer finished in a slightly mocking tone, which did not show whether or not she had forgiven the young man’s former opinion of her.
However, he was obstinate and so would not be interrupted. “Oh, Rose of a Thousand Leaves,” he ended for himself.
CHAPTER XXIII
Future Plans
“It was Sylvia who really arranged things for me,” Polly explained confidentially.
The girls were in Betty Ashton’s own blue room, having said good-bye to Sunrise cabin and turned their backs upon it for a time at least. But the cabin had been left ready to receive its owners at any time when they might be able to come back to it and week-end parties and Council Fire meetings were often to take place there, besides more important events which the girls could not well anticipate now.
But to-day was Betty Ashton’s birthday and although she was in too deep mourning for any kind of gayety, her Camp Fire friends had planned to stop by her house during the afternoon to leave little gifts for her, along with their best wishes. And Mollie and Polly O’Neill had arrived first.