"Oh, to be sure—it will be all right for you to come—all of you may come if you wish. You can go in one at a time, quietly. Then a couple of you may remain and help nurse her. I really need help, for I am all alone, and sat up all night with her, and have been close to her most of the day. Perhaps it would be well for you girls to make arrangements for relief nursing watches. You are perfectly welcome to keep her at my home until she is well, if you will relieve me of the necessity of nursing her."
"Come on, girls; get your wraps; we will all go over. It's only a couple of blocks. Hurry, everybody!"
"Wait, and I'll tell Kitty we're going out," Marion said.
She ran through several rooms, calling "Kittie! Kittie!" but received no response.
"I wonder where she is," the hostess said, in a puzzled manner. "Well, we haven't time to find her. Come on."
"I think I saw her go out more than half an hour ago," Harriet Newcomb said. "She called someone up on the telephone, and then put her hat and coat on and went out the side way, and I haven't seen her since."
"That's strange," Marion commented. Then the subject was forgotten. The twelve girls and their leader were walking rapidly toward the place where Mrs. Eddy, the good Samaritan, had taken in and cared for the girl whom every one of them loved as they would have loved a sister.
The house they stopped in front of was rather dingy and forbidding. It was a large brick structure, set back a hundred feet from the street on a plot of ground nearly an acre in extent. Most of the windows were darkened with green blinds two generations out of date.
Mrs. Eddy put a key into the lock and opened the door. Then she stepped aside and motioned the girls to enter, and they did so as if moved by a spell that they were unable to resist. Then the woman herself entered, closed the door and put the key into the lock and turned it. If the twelve Camp Fire Girls had no suspicions as to the genuineness of the motives of the woman up to this time, they had good and sufficient reason to anticipate something dreadful when they saw her take the key from the lock and put it in her coat pocket.
And still if there were any doubts in their minds after this act, they were effectively dispelled by the sound of a man's voice coming through a doorway from a dimly lighted room to the right, speaking thus: