In the drawing room where the hostess stood to receive, superb pink poppies reared their heads from tall vases, pink snapdragons bobbed on the mantel piece and a bank of pink candytuft lay on the top of the piano.  A lovely vine waved from a wall vase of exquisite design and vines trailed around the wide door as naturally as if they grew there instead of springing from bottles of water concealed behind tall jars of pink hollyhocks.

“It is perfectly charming, my dears, and I can’t tell you how obliged I am,” said their hostess as she pressed a bill into Ethel Brown’s hand.  “I know that every woman who will be here will want you the next time she entertains, and I shall tell everybody you did it.”

She was as good as her word and the attempt resulted in several other orders.  The girls tried to make each house different from any that they had decorated before, and they thought that they owed the success that brought them many compliments to the fact that they planned it all out beforehand and left nothing to be done in a haphazard way.

Meanwhile Rose House benefited greatly by the welcome weekly additions from the flower sale to its slender funds.

“I’m not sure it isn’t roses ye are yerselves, yer that sweet to look at!” exclaimed Moya, the cook at Rose House, one day when the girls were there.

And they admitted themselves that if happiness made them sweet to look at it must be true.

CHAPTER XIV

UNCLE DAN’S RESEARCHES

“Uncle Dan,” whose last name was Hapgood, did not cease his calls upon the Clarks.  Sometimes he brought with him his niece, whose name, they learned, was Mary Smith.

“Another Smith!” ejaculated Dorothy who had lived long enough in the world to find out the apparent truth of the legend, that originally all the inhabitants of the earth were named Smith and so continued until some of them misbehaved and were given other names by way of punishment.

No one liked Mr. Hapgood better as time went on.

“I believe he is a twentieth century werwolf, as Dorothy said,” Ethel Brown insisted.  “He’s a wolf turned into a man but keeping the feelings of a wolf.”

The girls found little to commend in the manners of his niece and nothing to attract.  By degrees the “botanist’s” repeated questioning put him in command of all the information the Clarks had themselves about the clue that Stanley was hunting down.  He seemed especially interested when he learned that the search had been transferred to the vicinity of Pittsburg.

“My sister, Mary’s mother, lived near Pittsburg,” he told them when he heard it; “I know that part of the country pretty well.”

For several days he was not seen either by the Clarks or by the girls who went to the Motor Inn to attend to the flowers, and Mrs. Foster told the Ethels that Mary had been left in her care while her uncle went away on a business trip.