“As soon as our Camp Fire girls had disappeared mother asked me what had become of you, and I have been looking for you ever since. It must have been an hour ago? What makes you such a goose?”
She spoke straightforwardly but without ill nature, so the older girl only laughed and shook her head.
“I am accustomed to being called a dreamer, Polly, cousin of mine, and a good many other things by my family, but not a goose. Still, I expect you are right.”
She put her arm across her cousin’s shoulder.
“When the girls were getting ready to go I slipped out here to the woods by myself. I was tired and wanted to be alone for a little while, but I should have told some one. Has Aunt Mollie worried about me? I built a fire, so I was not cold.”
Polly glanced back at the dying flames, as the two girls started for home.
“Your fire does not appear very warming,” she answered bluntly. “And mother was worrying. As you came to us, Bettina, because you were not well, naturally we feel responsible. But I suppose you were reading or writing, or else in the clouds. Funny why people in the clouds always wish to inhabit them alone. There ought to be room in the clouds for companions as well as in other places.”
The two girls were walking now arm in arm through a small pine woods in New Hampshire, just as another Polly and Betty had walked a good many years before. But these two girls—although their names were alike, and although they too were members of a Sunrise Hill Camp Fire Club—were utterly unlike the former ones in temperament and experience.
Bettina was the daughter of Betty Ashton and Anthony Graham. After her father had served his state as Governor for two terms, he had been sent as United States senator to Washington, where the family had since been living, coming back home to New Hampshire only for occasional summer vacations.
Yet now it was April and Bettina was on her way to the old Webster farmhouse which stood, as it always had, not far from the first Sunrise Hill Camp.