“And she never did,” asserted Nathalie with grave emphasis. “Presumably he immediately returned to Europe with his young wife, for although Mrs. Renwick soon repented of her folly, as father called it, and wrote her son again and again, she heard nothing from him. After employing detectives by the score with no result, she finally went abroad and endeavored herself to find some trace of him, but was not successful. She finally returned to America and started to seek him here, but found no clew to his whereabouts.
“As time passed—I think the matter preyed on her mind—she began to have queer spells. No, she wasn’t crazy, or anything like that, but just worried and unhappy, going off alone by herself for months at a time, presumably still trying to find her boy. After a time she would return from one of these erratic journeys, but she never told where she had been, and never mentioned her son’s name.
“Now we have come to the letter mother received yesterday. It was from my aunt’s lawyer, who summers in Littleton, New Hampshire. You see, Mrs. Renwick had considerable property in Boston and other places, but she was very fond of the White Mountains and always summered on Sugar Hill, where she had a lovely place called Seven Pillars, only a few miles from Littleton, and just a short distance from the mountain village of Franconia.
“The lawyer,” continued Nathalie, who by this time had quite an interested audience, “writes mother that Aunt Mary went off on one of her queer jaunts over a year ago and has not returned. In accordance with her wishes,—she always leaves a letter of instruction when she goes off this way,—mother and two cousins of mine from the West have been invited to spend the summer at this place on Sugar Hill. Mother wants to go, and I feel that she needs the change, so I shall have to go with her, and give up being a Liberty Girl.”
“But why should you have to go?” questioned Nita insistently. “Couldn’t your cousin, Lucille, or your sister, Dorothy, go with her? And then, oh, Nathalie, you could stay with us! Oh, that would be the dandiest thing! Oh, say yes, Nathalie; say yes.”
“Yes, Nita,” smiled Nathalie teasingly, as she placed her arm affectionately about the young girl, “it would be just dandy, as you say, for indeed I would like a rest myself this summer, because when the warm weather comes, housework does drag on one so. But Lucille is going to California to visit some cousins of hers, and has planned to take Dorothy with her. Dorothy is wild to go, and mother would not disappoint the child for the world. And then, too, the lawyer wrote mother that I was to come with her, as my aunt had given instructions. Oh, I just hate to give up my Liberty work!”
“But you will be back in the fall, Nathalie,” suggested Helen, “so why not let Lillie Bell take charge—she is vice-president—for the summer? It will give her something to think about, too, for she is possessed with the idea of going on the stage, and her mother is worrying herself ill over it.”
“Lillie wants to go on the stage?” repeated Nathalie in surprise. “Why, I didn’t know she had aspirations in that line. But do you think she would care to take charge of the club? O dear!” she broke off abruptly, “we had planned to do so many things this summer.” The girl’s voice was almost a wail.
“Why not carry your plans to the mountains with you,” inquired her friend, “and form a club of Liberty Girls up there? I am sure there will be some one who will be glad to belong, and you have such a fine way of getting people interested in things, Nathalie.”
“Possibly mother may change her mind and decide not to go,” returned Nathalie, brightening a little, “for she wants to be near Dick; you know he is now stationed at the Aviation Camp, Hazlehurst, at Mineola, near Camp Mills. And then, too, she says she hates to leave the house alone for so long a period.”