"What do you s'pose your Cousin Park Garnett would say, Page, if she knew that our chaperone for the house party had gone and got herself as good as engaged the very second evening?" laughed Dee.
"I fancy with her characteristic elegance she would exclaim: 'Oh, you chaperone!'"
CHAPTER VIII.
LETTERS.
To Dr. James Allison from Page Allison.
Willoughby Beach,
July—, 191—.
We are having the grandest time that ever was and all we want now is for you to take a little holiday and come down to see us. It would do you worlds of good and surely your patients can let you go for a little while. Sometimes I think you should get an assistant or try to persuade some young doctor to settle in the neighbourhood. You never have any fun. I feel very selfish to have gone off and left you and Mammy Susan when I have been away all winter, but I promise to come back the first of next month and not to budge from Bracken until it is time to go to school the middle of September. I hope Cousin Sue Lee will be with us then, as I should hate to miss her visit, one moment of it. On the other hand I devoutly hope that Cousin Park Garnett will pay her yearly visitation while I am away. I heard a rumor that a Mrs. Garnett was expected at the hotel here, but I am trusting in my hitherto lucky stars that it is not Cousin Park. If she comes to Willoughby, I am going to bury my head in the sand, like an ostrich, and pretend I'm somebody else.
There is a camp of boys near us and they are just as nice as can be and seem to think it is their affair to give all of us girls a good time. They rented this cottage for last month and liked Willoughby so much that when their time was up they started a camp. They are James Hart, Stephen White, George Massie and Ben Raglan. They are called Jim, Wink, Sleepy and Rags, and as we have come to know them pretty well and they are not the kind of boys one stands on ceremony with, we call them by their nicknames, too. Wink White is studying medicine and so is Sleepy, when he is not playing foot-ball or sleeping. Wink is very clever and intensely interested in his work.