“Where you going?” he asked, resting a friendly hand on the rowboat’s rim.

Bobby described an arc with her oar that incidentally showered the questioner with shining water drops.

“We’re out for adventure,” she answered airily.

“Just got our swimming certificates to-day,” volunteered Betty.

Bob flashed her a congratulatory smile.

“Race you to the end of the lake?” suggested Tommy Tucker.

Bobby regarded him with magnificent scorn.

“As if eight of you couldn’t beat two!” she said significantly.  “I never heard such talk!  Why you’d have a walk!” she added.

The boys shouted with laughter.

“You’re a poet, Bobby,” declared Tommy.  “Tennyson had nothing on you—­had he, Libbie?”

Libbie turned her dark eyes on him and frowned a little.

“I wasn’t listening,” she said indifferently.

“Well, anyway, row up to the end of the lake, will you?” suggested Gilbert.  “With drill night ahead of us, we want a little brightness to remember the day by.”

Canoes, rowboat and shell swept on up the lake, and when the scrubby pines that bordered the narrow peak of the north shore were in sight, Bobby glanced back over her shoulder at Betty.

“You’re spattering me,” she complained.

“I thinks it’s beginning to rain,” said Betty mildly, and even as she spoke, Louise called to them: 

“Girls, it’s beginning to pour!”

A sudden blast of wind struck them, blowing the rain against their backs.

“Keep on rowing!” shouted Bob’s voice.  “We’ll have to land and walk back.  You girls can never beat back against this storm.  We’re almost to the shore now.”

A few minutes more and the boats touched shore.  The boys were out in an instant and helped the girls to land.

“We’ll carry up the boats—­don’t you think that is best, Tommy?” shouted Bob.  “If we carry them up high enough and leave them, they will be perfectly safe.”

The wind and the rain made shouting necessary if one’s voice were to carry above the storm.  The boys lifted the light boats and carried them into the woods, turning them over so that the keels were up.

“Now the question is,” said Bob, who seemed by common consent to have been elected leader, “shall we walk along the shore and get drenched, or take a chance of finding our way through the woods?”

To their astonishment, Libbie burst into a fit of hysterical weeping.

“Don’t go through the woods,” she begged, her teeth chattering.  “We’ll fall into that awful Indian Chasm.”

Bobby’s heart reproached her for her thoughtless joke and she put an arm around her cousin.

“Libbie, you never thought I was serious about pushing you into the chasm, did you?” she asked anxiously.  “Is that what has been making you act so queerly ever since?  I was only fooling.”

So, thought Betty, Bobby, too, had noticed Libbie’s unnatural behavior.