“Why! My dear!” the little lady cried when Lucile had explained. “You may put your mind quite at ease. Besides yourselves I am positively the only person on the island. What’s more,” she smiled, “I have in my igloo oodles and oodles of food, enough for all of us for six months to come.”
The three girls fairly gasped in their relief and delight. It was with the greatest difficulty that they refrained from embracing the visitor.
“I suppose,” said the stranger, “that you would like to know how it comes about that I am living here on this island all by myself; and, above all things, in an igloo. Well, you see, my uncle owns this island. He is a retired Arctic trader. For twenty years he lived on the coast of the Arctic—made a huge fortune in furs and whale bone. Then he came back to the city to live.
“Well, you see,” she sighed after a pause for breath, “he had lived in igloos on the Arctic coast for so long that he wasn’t satisfied with the cave he lived in on the shores, in the noisy city. So what does he do but buy this little island and have a wonderful little igloo built beneath one of its sand dunes?
“Of course he doesn’t live in his igloo all the time; just comes over when he wishes to. This winter he is spending in Florida so he lent his igloo to me.
“I graduated from the university last year. And I wanted to write a book, a book about the vanishing race—the Eskimo. Sort of an Eskimo Ramona, don’t you know.
“I had never been in Alaska but my uncle had told me about it. Nights and nights he talked about nothing else, so I knew enough to make a book. All I needed was the atmosphere. I thought I could get that best by coming out here and living in his igloo all by myself, paddling about in a kiak, fishing through the ice and all that. So that,” she laughed, “is how I came to be here.”
The three girls stared at her with looks of wonderment in which was mingled not a little joy. Had she been a fairy come down from some magic kingdom to render them a great service she could hardly have been more welcome.
“Oh!” she cried, bouncing up from her chair, “You shall all go to my igloo. We will have dinner together there and—and why don’t you bring along a few of your things, prepared to stay all night? You’ll hardly be leaving to-night. No, of course you won’t. Ice won’t let you.”
“It’s not alone the ice,” said Florence soberly. “We don’t know how to start our motor.”