“If you do not keep quiet, I shall be obliged to restrain you,” said the nurse.  “Miss Harriwell, we are taking you back to the sanitarium.  I am your new nurse.”

“Sanitarium!  New nurse!  Miss Harriwell!  I am Dorothy Dale, and I have never been inside a sanitarium!”

The carriage dashed into a driveway!  A big brownstone building confronted them.

A corps of nurses hurried out to the path!

When Dorothy saw them she fainted!

CHAPTER XIX

CAMPING DAYS

Tavia got off the train at the Junction, but she did not get on the one that went toward Clamberton—­it flew by.  She waved her handkerchief—­she waved her coat, she told herself she waved her soul, but that train simply would not stop.

And she was miles from nowhere!

“Well, I’ll walk it!” she declared.  “I don’t care how I get there, I’m going to keep my nose toward camp!”

To walk the railroad ties!  That was one thing Tavia loathed—­they were so regular, so straight, so abominably correct.

“Of course railroad ties were never built for human feet, even the straight and narrow are not as straight as these.”

She moved along for a hundred or so of ties, then she threatened to sit down.  Tavia was desperate, but even in her present surprising state of mind, the railroad ties were too much for her, and she kept on.

“I might fly,” she reflected, looking boldly at the ocean of blue above, “but there isn’t a machine in sight.”

More and more ties until she came to a small bridge.

“Well, I suppose if I try to walk this thing I shall presently find myself holding a session with some slimy, muddy frogs.  Ugh!” and she looked between the ties at the lurking depths of mud and other things on either side of the railroad embankment.  “I just hate—­uncertainties.”

She stepped cautiously a little farther.  “Well, if I fall it serves me right.  I shouldn’t have done this!”

Tavia—­poor Tavia!

The place was very lonely.  Tavia realized this.  She knew instantly that she was in the woods.  It may have been her primitive hatred of the forest that inspired this sentiment, but there was always something about the depths of solitude that made her want to laugh—­it was positively funny to her.  Something must happen.

“If there were a single human being in sight,” she sighed.  Then she repeated, “I said ‘single.’”

It was almost dusk.  She thought of old Sam.  Wasn’t that funny!  Then of her mending—­shirring socks!  When he tried them on he might change his mind about making her his heir.

“And that loon!” This last referred to Morrison.  “When I believed him, I may, some day, believe myself!”

She picked out a few more ties, and came to another and larger culvert.  “Suppose a train should come,” she gasped.  The strain of the past few days was having its natural revenge—­reaction.  Her depression had soured into hilarity.  “Well, I’ll run the bridge—­I have always heard it is the only safe way.”  She looked up, far beyond the ties.  She would have closed her eyes, but that strange feeling of sight-security, which does not depend upon sight, compelled her to look—­but not at the ties.