"We will come up and help her pack as soon as we get the house righted," Tabitha found tongue to say. "She mustn't get too tired before she starts."
So Mercedes raced away again, and a few moments later the two busy little housekeepers in the hollow locked up their orderly cottage and followed more slowly up to the Eagles' Nest on the bluff.
"Where can the children be?" Tabitha's expectant eyes searched in vain for a glimpse of the noisy, lively brood of 'eaglets,' who usually saw her coming a long way off, and met her half-way down the mountainside with a boisterous shout of welcome. To-day, however, not one of the sextette was in sight about the queer little brown house, and the whole place wore a deserted air.
"Maybe they have gone visiting so Mrs. McKittrick can look after her packing unmolested," suggested Gloriana, letting her keen gray eyes sweep the steep, rocky incline for some sign of the youthful McKittricks, but with no better result.
"That must be it," concluded Tabitha, "though I should have thought—why, Mercedes, Susie! What is the matter?"
Coming suddenly around the corner of a huge boulder where the children often played house, the two girls almost tumbled over a row of the most woe-begone, utterly miserable looking figures they had ever seen,—Mercedes, Susie, Inez, Irene, Rosslyn and Janie, all seated on a broad, flat rock as stiff as marble statues, and with faces almost as stony and staring.
"Why, children!" echoed Gloriana, equally amazed. "What are you doing here? What has happened?"
"Mamma is crying again," whispered Mercedes, dabbing savagely at a tear which suddenly brimmed over and splashed down the end of her nose.
"She says she won't go and leave us alone with Mercy," gulped Susanne, striving hard to keep the telltale quiver out of her voice.
"And there ain't money enough to go and take us all," supplemented Inez, who had earned the title of "Susie's shadow," because she preferred the society of her older sister to that of her quiet twin.