The Automobile Girls at Newport: or, Watching the Summer Parade. Crane Laura Dent
here. I hope father will not hear you have been sent for!”
She patted affectionately the nearest tire-rim of the big automobile. “Bless the ‘bubble’s’ heart,” she murmured. “He wouldn’t run away with his missus. Barbara, Mollie, this is my best friend, Mr. A. Bubble. I think you’ll get better acquainted with him before long. I wish you could come with me now, but I’m afraid neither you nor ‘Bubble’ would be quite comfortable. And you three must get along well together from the start.”
The doctor helped Ruth into the big red touring car and Gladys and Grace followed. The two men and the chauffeur crowded together in the front seat.
“Au revoir,” chorused the autoists, and “see you tomorrow,” nodded Ruth emphatically to the girls. Then, in a whirl of dust, the big machine sped out of sight.
“Isn’t she a dear?” burst forth Mollie, as the sisters turned to go back to the house. “How her eyes shine when she talks! I wonder if I could do my hair that way. I was sure she’d be nice – but what do you suppose she means by that plan? Barbara, for heaven’s sake, how did you happen to think of that umbrella stunt? It was great, but you did look so funny – like a sort of desperate, feminine Darius Green with his flying machine! No wonder you stopped the horses!”
“Oh, I heard of a man who stopped a stampede of cattle that way out West once,” Barbara answered abstractedly. There was a puzzled look on her face. “Mollie,” she said abruptly, as they entered the house, “you didn’t take our money with you, when you went into the bedroom for pencil and paper?”
“Why, no,” replied Mollie wonderingly. “It must be over there on the table now. I remember I noticed it as I came into the room. I wondered, for a second, why you’d gone away and left it so near the open window. That was before I looked through the window and saw what you were doing. It must be there,” and Mollie hurried over to the window.
The next moment she turned an astonished face to her sister. “Barbara!” she exclaimed, “it isn’t here, anywhere!” Indeed, the marble top of the little table was absolutely bare. There was no sign of either of the gold pieces.
“Let’s look on the floor,” said Barbara, quietly. “One of our guests may have unconsciously brushed them off.”
Both girls stopped and began a careful survey of the carpeted floor, under the table, and near the window. Their search was unrewarded.
“Let’s look in the grass outside,” suggested Mollie. “You might have brushed them off as you went through the window.”
“But didn’t you say you saw them on the table, when you came back into the room and found me gone?” queried Barbara, thoughtfully.
“I was sure I did,” Mollie replied. “But sometimes one remembers imaginary things. And if the money had been in the room when I came in, it would be there now. I’ll ask mother – ”
“No, don’t,” said Barbara quickly; “at least, not yet.” Mrs. Thurston had gone into the kitchen directly after her return from the gate, and had heard none of the conversation. “There’s no need to worry mother about it now. Of course we must find it somewhere. Money doesn’t walk off by itself. We’ll go out and look in the grass under the window.”
On hands and knees the girls worked through the closely cropped grass underneath the sitting room window. Not two days before, they themselves had clipped this bit of lawn with big shears, and it was so close that there seemed no possibility of anything being hidden in it. Certainly nothing was to be found. The girls even looked over the short path, and ground near it. “Your skirts might have switched those small things a long way,” observed Mollie, wisely. Yet, as before, the result was – nothing.
Giving it up, at last, the girls sat down in a little garden seat at one side of the tiny yard, and looked at each other ruefully.
“I am so glad I feel sure Miss Stuart will invite us to her party, now,” commented Mollie dryly. “Our new gowns and the pink hair ribbons and the silk stockings will be so awfully fetching! But where, where, where, by all that’s mysterious, can those double-eagles have flown?”
Suddenly she looked curiously at her sister. “Barbara, you are thinking of something!” she exclaimed. “Have you any nameable idea?”
“No,” said Barbara, quickly; “it isn’t nameable.”
“All right; you never would talk when you didn’t want to,” complained Mollie. “And I know you want that money back as badly as I do. Tell you what – I’ll say the fairies’ charm. Don’t you remember the one the old gypsy woman taught us? Wish she were here to say it for us! She promised to do all sorts of things for me when I found her in the field with a sprained ankle and helped her back to camp. Why! why! Barbara, this is uncanny– she’s coming now!”
In truth, down the road a queer little bent figure was seen approaching. “I know her,” continued Mollie eagerly, “by that funny combination of red and yellow handkerchiefs she wears on her head. Do let’s go and meet her and tell her – it can’t do any harm.”
“What nonsense, Mollie!” laughed Barbara. But she followed her younger sister, who had already started down the road toward the quaint, little, gaudily-turbaned dame.
Between them, the girls brought her into the yard, Mollie meanwhile busily explaining their predicament. “You’ll help us, won’t you, Granny Ann?” she coaxed childishly. “You said, that time that I helped you home, you’d always be near when I wanted you.”
Granny Ann sat on the garden seat, looking gravely down at the half-laughing, half-serious girls huddled at her feet.
“I knowed,” she began in a high, cracked voice, “I knowed my little fair one,” lightly touching Mollie’s curls, “would need me to-day. Far away I was, when I heard the shadow of her voice callin’ out to me – and miles I have traveled to reach her. Granny Ann is thirsty, and she has had no food since morning.” The old woman looked reproachfully at her listeners.
Barbara’s eyes twinkled at Mollie’s rather crestfallen face, when the sybil voiced this most human request. But she said cheerily: “All right, Granny; supper isn’t ready yet, but I know mother’ll have something.” Then Barbara hurried into the house, the gypsy dame waiting solemnly until she reappeared, a moment later, with sandwiches, doughnuts and a big glass of milk.
Granny Ann smiled, but she didn’t speak until the lunch had quite disappeared. Then the old woman rose impressively. “There’s one sure magic for fetching back money that has gone,” she declaimed. “Because you have been good to me, ‘Little Fair One,’ you and your sister, I will say the golden spell for you.” With her hands crossed, Granny Ann began to croon dreamily:
Gold is gladsome, gold is gay,
Here to-night and gone to-day,
Here to-day and gone to-morrow,
Guest of joy and host of sorrow.
Gold of mine that’s flitted far,
Forget me not, where’er you are.
Mine you are, as Pluto wrought you,
Mine you are, whoever’s sought you,
Come by sea or come by land —
Homeward fly into my hand!
Three times Granny Ann repeated this. Then, with a queer dignity, oddly assorting with her variegated raiment, she turned to the girls. “It will return,” she said; “now, I must go to my own people.”
“But I thought you said you came here for us by yourself!” protested Mollie.
The gypsy dame drew herself up. “I travel not alone!” she said, stiffly. “Good-bye.”
“Oh, good-bye, and thanks ever so much, Granny Ann!” cried both of the girls.
But Granny Ann did not turn her head. Barbara looked