"No, Bettina, I could not have told you, since I had no idea the girls were in New York. You see, they have never before been to see me or let me hear where they were. Have you been in town long?"
There was a short, uncomfortable silence.
"About a month; but please let me explain," Alice Ashton said, seeing that the other girls were waiting for her to assume the responsibility of a reply. "I realize this must seem strange to you, and I grant you it does look odd, as if we had lost all our affection and gratitude. And yet you can not believe this of us!"
"I have made no accusation," the Camp Fire guardian returned, yet in her tone and manner there was an unconscious accusation, which made it difficult for Alice to continue.
"I am afraid you are wounded, Tante; I am sorry," she added awkwardly and paused.
Guardian of the Sunrise Camp Fire girls for a number of years, Mrs. Richard Burton, whose professional name was Polly O'Neill Burton, had given up her career on the stage and traveled with the Camp Fire girls in the west. Later when the great war turned the world upside down she had gone with them to Europe accompanied by a wealthy and eccentric spinster, Miss Patricia Lord. After two years in France and a summer in England they had come back to their own country and on account of the Camp Fire guardian's health had spent the preceding winter in the Adirondacks.[*]
[*] See "Camp Fire Girls" Series.
With the close of the winter Mrs. Burton had returned to the stage and the Camp Fire girls to their homes. There had been no meeting between them until to-day.
"Tante" was the title which the greater number of the Sunrise Camp Fire girls used in speaking to their guardian.
"Please don't behave as if you were too wounded to be angry," Sally Ashton remonstrated, moving closer to the older woman and slipping an arm about her. "And please remember that it is a good deal more of a trial for your Camp Fire girls to have been separated from you for all these months than for you to have had a brief rest from their society. Some of us at least realize that you have given too much of yourself to us for the last few years when a so much larger public needed you. I can't tell you how proud I am of your latest success. I have read dozen of notices in the papers and the critics all say that you are more wonderful than ever."