A moment later Mrs. Webster sat down beside her son, giving a suppressed sigh of relief. Billy seemed so much better, although he had been at the new Sunrise Camp but little over a week.
A short time before the Sunrise Hill Camp Fire party, who had been for several months living in a group of tents on the borders of the Painted Desert, had moved on to the neighborhood of the Grand Canyon. They were now in camp not far from the famous Angel Trail.
But before they were fairly settled a letter had arrived from Mrs. Webster saying that she would like to join the Camp Fire party and wished to bring along her two sons, Dan and Billy Webster.
There was no possibility of declining to welcome the newcomers, for it was Billy’s serious illness which had made a western trip necessary and forced his father’s consent to their joining his aunt’s camping party.
However, the campers were extraordinarily well pleased and particularly Polly Burton. For if her beloved Mollie were with her, surely her difficulties as Camp Fire guardian were over. She and Mollie were so unlike they were complements to each other.
“Fact is when we are together, Mollie mine, we have all the virtues and leave none to be desired,” Polly O’Neill, who was now Mrs. Richard Burton, had more than once announced to her twin sister.
And Mollie had laughed as she always did, accepting the speech as only one of her gifted sister’s absurdities. For, in spite of her Polly’s genius, her opinions never made much impression upon Mrs. Webster.
Nevertheless, perhaps on this point she was not altogether wrong. Already, since Mrs. Webster’s coming, the group of Camp Fire girls unconsciously were under the spell of its truth. There were some to whom Mollie Webster represented the influences which they needed and desired. She was far more motherly than her sister and loved to fuss and worry over each girl’s health and appetite. Yet, in her gentler fashion, she was really more exacting than Mrs. Burton, as such apparently yielding natures often are.
Already Alice Ashton and Vera Lageloff felt more closely drawn to Mrs. Webster—Vera, because she was Billy’s mother and had been her friend before she met Mrs. Burton.
With Alice Ashton the circumstances were different. For one thing, Alice felt that her Aunt Mollie took her more seriously and had a real respect for her intellectual interests and abilities. She could not always be perfectly certain that the other Camp Fire guardian was not sometimes a little amused by her ambitions.