Not for worlds would they have disclosed the real truth to Mr. Campbell.  Billie drew her arm through her father’s and Nancy followed them to the house.

“Do you think the rain will ever let up, Papa?” asked Billie, resting her cheek against her father’s shoulder.

Nancy felt suddenly frightfully homesick for her own bluff good-natured parent.

“Well, it once rained forty days and forty nights, you know,” said Mr. Campbell.  “And what’s happened before may happen again.”

Habitual wranglers regard quarrels as mere ripples on the surface and soon forget about them, but the two girls were unaccustomed to such scenes and their feelings were deeply lacerated.

“Let not the sun go down upon your wrath,” Billie thought, as she lay beside Nancy that night, but she remembered that Nancy had called her a spy and her soul was filled with bitterness.

CHAPTER XIV.

A LETTER THAT CAME THOUGH IT WAS NEVER SENT.

The two girls put the width of the bed between them that night.  Each lay stiffly on the very edge of the mattress and silently pondered over the situation.  Anger was not a self-indulgence with either of them and the attack was so unusual that it left them both unnerved and shaken.  Nancy had only played with her food at dinner and Billie, who had eaten without an appetite, now felt the discomfort of a burning indigestion.  At last, as the hours dragged on, they fell asleep, each profoundly unhappy.

Long ago the two friends had dropped the formality which usually exists between guest and hostess, no matter how intimate.  Their relations were as those of two sisters.  For the Motor Maids had become as one family in their wanderings together.  But next morning, Nancy, still feeling the sting of fancied wrongs, suddenly recalled the fact that she was accepting hospitality from one who no longer liked her.  It was all very absurd, but so does the young person at the awkward age between girlhood and womanhood often exaggerate trivial things and enlarge on fancied injustice.

Foolish, pretty Nancy permitted herself to slip into the most extreme state of wretchedness.  She imagined that her friend, whom in her heart she loved devotedly, had treated her with unnecessary cruelty and sternness.  She got it into her silly little head that Billie had confided the meeting in the garden to the others.  She was ashamed and mortified and she felt indeed that the whole world had turned against her.  Mr. Campbell was cold to her.  Miss Helen Campbell hardly civil Mary and Elinor looked at her askance.  There was not a word of truth in it, of course; it was just a figment of Nancy’s morbid imaginings.  Miss Campbell was bored to extinction with the continued rain.  Mr. Campbell was preoccupied because of business engagements of great importance, and Mary and Elinor, if the truth must be told, were intensely homesick; and who would not have been with home on the other side of the world and rain pouring ceaselessly on this side?  As for Billie, she tried to be exactly the same as usual, but the cloud of an unsettled disagreement hovered between them.