Mrs. Burton, who had been walking a few feet apart from her companions, now flushed and laughed. Catching up, she slipped her hand through Miss Patricia’s free arm, resting her head for an instant against the angular shoulder.
“I may be the one, but you know I am not the other, Miss Patricia Lord! Besides, I am as ashamed of you as I am of myself for being in such a bad temper.
“Look at our cabin how beautiful it is! Let us ask Tahawus, the great cloud, to keep us under his shelter for the night. I hope the Camp Fire girls are safe in bed. Sometimes, Betty, I could wish that none of them need ever grow older.”
“A wish in which they would scarcely concur, Polly. One wants the life adventure whatever it may be. Besides, our Camp Fire builds for the future as well as for the present.”
Having reached the veranda, Bettina Graham, hearing the voices outside, came to open the front door; wearing a heavy blue flannel wrapper over her blue pajamas, her bare feet were thrust into blue slippers and around her small head her hair was closely bound in yellow braids.
“I have been waiting to say good-night. Of course I realized that any truants would be you and Tante, mother.”
“Bettina,” her mother replied irrelevantly, “you should have been called Diana; your own name has never suited you in the least and it was absurd that you should have been named for me when you are so unlike me. Since I have been watching you here in these woods——”
Bettina and Mrs. Burton laughed and even Aunt Patricia smiled grimly.
“Is it my present costume which recalls the famous huntress, mother, or is it that the woods are making you romantic? Please remember that I do not enjoy being reminded that I am wholly unlike my beautiful mother. I too have wished for auburn hair—wine colored our young poet called it to-night, did he not?—and eyes like——?”
“Go to bed, Bettina. There is nothing of the goddess about you in manner or behavior at this moment.”