It was not yet daylight when Bettina Graham first opened her eyes the morning after their arrival, and yet she felt completely rested. She was sleeping beside Peggy, while on the opposite side of the room were Gerry Williams and the Russian girl, Vera Lageloff.
“Camping also makes strange bedfellows,” Bettina thought with the quiet sense of humor so few people realized she possessed. She was not homesick—life at present held too many fascinating possibilities—but it was natural that she should begin thinking of her own home in Washington, and more especially of her own suite of rooms. They had been recently refurnished—as a birthday gift from her father—in pale grey and rose color, with the furniture of French oak.
Bettina appreciated that she had known nothing but the fair side of life—that it was almost a weakness of her father’s to do more for her than she even desired. Senator Graham was not ashamed of his own humble past and the hard struggle of his boyhood; but, like many another self-made man, for this reason he wished his family to have every indulgence. Yet, although the close bond of sympathy was between Bettina and her father and Tony and his mother, Senator Graham did not wish his daughter to know only the life of luxury and self-indulgence.
Therefore, it was he who had been most in favor of the western camping experiment. Bettina was to long remember his saying that he wished her “to find herself” and that this one must do away from one’s own family.
In camping with so wealthy and famous a woman as Polly Burton there would be scarcely any great hardships to be endured. The new Sunrise Camp Fire girls were in more danger of having life made too easy for them rather than too difficult. Yet there might be circumstances now and then which would require good sense and courage to overcome. And, most of all, Bettina needed to see the practical side of every-day life.
“It was so like Polly O’Neill to get together such an extraordinarily unlike group of girls, but I had hoped Polly O’Neill Burton might have better judgment,” Betty Graham had lamented to her husband and daughter, half in earnest and half amused.
But when her husband assured her that this was one of the particular reasons why he wished Bettina to form one of the group, Mrs. Graham, suddenly remembering his humble origin, had been wisely silent.
Therefore, before setting out on their western trip, Bettina had firmly made up her mind to do her best to be friendly with the entire group of Camp Fire girls. And, on waking this first morning of their arrival, she was in a measure reproaching herself for her lack of effort on the journey.
Then unexpectedly Bettina sat upright in bed, feeling that she must get out of doors at once. She needed to breathe the fresh air in order to get rid of a stupid impression which had just taken hold of her.
All her life Bettina had been given to odd fancies—impressions which annoyed her mother deeply, and which she herself considered strange and uncomfortable. Just at this moment, for instance, and in the midst of her good resolution, Bettina had been assailed by a kind of presentiment. She had a feeling, which was part mental and part physical, that among the four girls in the room—for Vera and Gerry Williams were sleeping opposite herself and Peggy—one of the four of them, either consciously or unconsciously would bring misfortune upon the others.