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ILLUSTRATIONS

The Camp Fire Girls in
After Years

CHAPTER I

Half an hour before sunset a number of workmen hurried away across the grounds, while a little later from behind the closed blinds glowed hundreds of softly shaded electric lights. The lawns were strung with rows and rows of small lamps suspended from one giant tree to the next, but waiting for actual darkness to descend before shedding forth their illumination.

Evidently preparations had been made on a splendid scale, both inside the house and out, for an entertainment of some kind. Yet curiously there seemed to be a strange hush over everything, a sense of anxiety and suspense pervading the very atmosphere. Then, in odd contrast to the other lights, the room on the third floor to the left was in almost total darkness save for a single tiny flame no larger than a nurse's covered candle.

At about half-past six o'clock suddenly and with almost no noise the front door of the house opened. The next moment a slight form appeared upon the flight of broad steps and gazed down the avenue. From behind her came the mingled fragrance of roses and violets, while before her arose the even more delicious tang of earth and grass and softly drifting autumn leaves of the late October evening.

Nevertheless neither the beauty of the evening nor its perfumes attracted the girl's attention, for her expression remained grave and frightened, and without appearing aware of it she sighed several times.

Small and dark, with an extraordinary quantity of almost blue-black hair and a thin white face dominated by a pair of unhappy dark eyes, the girl's figure suggested a child, although she was plainly older. In her hand she carried a cane upon which she leaned slightly.

"It does seem too hard for this trouble to have come at this particular time," she murmured in unconscious earnestness. "If only I could do something to help, yet there is absolutely nothing, of course, except to wait. Still, I wish Faith would come home."

Then, after peering for another moment down the avenue of old elms and maple trees, she turned and went back into the house, closing the door behind her and moving almost noiselessly.

For the present no one else was to be seen, at least in the front part of the big mansion, except the solitary figure of this young girl, who looked somewhat incongruous and out of place in her handsome surroundings. Notwithstanding, she seemed perfectly at home and was plainly neither awed by nor unfamiliar with them. The hall was decorated with palms and evergreens and festoons of vines, and adorning the high walls were portraits, most of them of men of stern countenance and of a past generation, while here and there stood a marble bust. But without regarding any of these things with special attention the girl walked quickly past them and entered the drawing room on the right. Then at last her face brightened.

Surely the room was beautiful enough to have attracted any one's attention, although it was not exactly the kind of room one would see in a private house, for it happened to be in the Governor's mansion in the state of New Hampshire.

In preparation for the evening's entertainment the furniture had been moved away except for a number of chairs and divans. The two tall marble mantels were banked with roses and violets and baskets of roses swung from the two crystal chandeliers.

With a murmured exclamation the girl dropped down on a low stool in the corner where the evergreens almost entirely concealed her and where she appeared more like an elf creature that had come into the house with the green things surrounding her than an everyday girl. For a quarter of an hour she must have remained there alone, when she was aroused from her reverie by some one's entrance. Then, although the girl did not move or speak, her whole face changed and the sullen, unhappy look disappeared, while oddly her eyes filled with tears.

There could have been nothing fairer in the room than the woman who had just come quietly into it. She must have been about twenty-eight years old; her hair was a beautiful auburn, like sunshine on certain brown and red leaves in the woods in late October; her eyes were gray, and she was of little more than medium height, with slender hips, but a full throat and chest. At the present moment she was wearing a house gown of light blue cashmere, and although she looked as if life might always before have been kind to her, at present her face was pale and there were marks of sleeplessness about her eyes and mouth.

Apparently trying to summon an interest in her surroundings which she scarcely felt, she glanced about the room until her eyes rested on the silent girl.

"Why, Angel, what are you doing in here alone, child? How lovely everything looks, and yet I am afraid I cannot come down to receive people tonight. All afternoon I have been trying to make up my mind to attempt it and each moment it seems more impossible."

Then with a gesture indicating both fatigue and discouragement the woman sat down, folding her hands in her lap.

"But the baby isn't any worse, I heard only half an hour ago," the younger girl interrupted quickly, and in answer to a shake of the head from her companion went on: "You simply must be present tonight, Princess. This is the greatest night in your husband's career and you know the Inaugural Ball would be an entire failure without you! Staying up-stairs won't