A few days later the Camp Fire guardian drove over to the hotel nearby, accompanied only by Mr. Jefferson Simpson.
Bettina had offered to go with her, but she had announced that she preferred going alone.
This was curious because the one thing Mrs. Burton had made a point of, ever since the arrival of her Camp Fire party in Arizona, was that she be allowed to remain as inconspicuous as possible. And, if she wished nobody to find out who she was, she had certainly to remain in obscurity.
To appear at a fashionable hotel filled with Eastern tourists was to proclaim her identity, since the greater number of them would assuredly be familiar with her appearance, knowing her by reputation if not having actually seen her act.
But Mrs. Burton was too worried to consider small, personal annoyances. Then she had a fashion of acting suddenly, having no very great patience with the things that displeased her.
For the last few days the atmosphere of the Sunrise camp had not been an agreeable one. However, the trouble was not with the Camp Fire girls, they being only incidental; the difficulty was a family one, which is of all varieties the most trying. And Mrs. Burton had been away from her own family so much of the time that she had almost forgotten how wrought up one can become over comparatively small matters, when they affect one’s own people.
In the first place, for several days Peggy Webster had been entirely unlike herself, without giving the least reason for her sudden change from her natural buoyancy to a condition of gravity and depression.
More annoying, she insisted that she was not depressed. When Mrs. Burton and Bettina frankly told her that they did not believe her assertion; nevertheless she would take neither one of them into her confidence.
Afterwards when Mrs. Burton insisted that Peggy was not well and must have suffered from her fall and so should see a doctor, Peggy flatly declined to see one. However, Peggy’s refusal did not affect her aunt.
One of the errands which brought her to the hotel was to call upon the hotel physician and make an appointment with him to come over to their camp.