"'Oh, Mollie, do be careful,'" she mimicked.

"'I don't care about dying, but I'd rather choose a neater death!'"

But for once Amy refused to bite. She simply smiled calmly and helped herself to another of Grace's fast disappearing chocolates.

"Go as far as you like, dear," was her surprising comment. "I feel rather wild and woolly myself to-day. Nothing you could do would bother me."

The girls looked surprised--Mollie anxious.

"Goodness," she said disconsolately, "that takes away half the fun. What's the use of teasing you when you won't tease?"

"Does seem rather a waste of time," remarked Amy, and they gaped anew.

"Goodness, what has come over the child?" asked Grace of Betty, adding with sudden suspicion, "She must have had a letter."

"Did you?" they cried all at once, fixing accusing eyes upon her.

"You must be joking," Amy answered plaintively. "I haven't had a letter for so long I don't know what it would look like."

"It is just about time we heard from the boys again," said Betty thoughtfully. "Has anybody been to the post-office to-day?"

It seemed n.o.body had, for everybody had been too busy; so Mollie made an abrupt turn, almost sending the car into a ditch, and headed back for town.

"Now what are you doing?" queried Amy plaintively.

"Going to remedy an awful mistake," Mollie replied shortly. "I couldn't enjoy my holiday if I thought there might be letters waiting for us."

Amy and Grace protested.

But they were not disappointed. There were not only letters from the boys, but several fat and interesting epistles from friends and relatives in Deepdale, including two from Paul and Dodo, Mollie's small and mischievous brother and sister.

"Let's drive away out of town where we can be by ourselves," Betty suggested, face radiant, fingers fairly aching to tear the precious missives from their envelopes. "Then we can stop the car and Mollie can read hers, too."

"You always have the right idea, Betty honey," said Mollie, with fond emphasis, as she swung the car at breakneck speed down the street and headed for the open country. "Now aren't you glad," she flung at Grace and Amy, "that we made you go back with us and take a chance?"

"Don't rub it in, Mollie dear," purred Grace, too happy at the prospect before them to contradict anything or anybody on earth. "We are deeply appreciative and inordinately grateful to you for your wonderful foresight and insistence."

"Is she calling me names?" cried Mollie threateningly. "For if she is, I should like to remark for the benefit of each and every one that I am still in possession of the wheel, and a swift and terrible doom shall overtake--"

"Rave on, rave on, Macbeth," chuckled Betty, adding with a whimsical smile and a quickened heart beat as she fingered the letter she had so carefully placed under the rest: "There's no use, Mollie dear--you can't start a rumpus now. It can't be done. We're all too good-natured."

"That's the way Frank talks after a particularly good meal," chuckled Mollie.

"And I never saw boys who were so absolutely crazy about hot biscuits,"

sighed Amy. "If you gave them enough hot biscuits, they didn't seem to know or care whether they had anything else or not."

"Yes, somebody was always stirring up biscuit dough when we were at Pine Island," agreed Grace, her eyes dreamy. "I think one of us should have invented a patent stirrer--just in self-defense!"

"Just the same, I'd wager anything," cried Betty, with a thrill in her voice and the hint of tears behind the brightness of her eyes, "that there isn't one of us who wouldn't be willing to make biscuits from morning till night if we only had the boys here to eat them."

"Oh, wouldn't we!" cried Amy hungrily. "I shouldn't care if I turned into a biscuit!"

They laughed at that, but the laugh was not scornful, for their hearts were very full and tender.

"Sha'n't we stop here?" Mollie asked, after they had ridden a long, long way in silence. "It's private enough--"

"Oh, yes, yes," the others interrupted her eagerly, and as Mollie guided the car over to the side of the road, Betty sprang the news she had been bursting to tell ever since they started.

"Girls," she cried, and quickly they turned to her, sensing something unusual in her tone, "I have a surprise for you."

"Yes?" they cried eagerly.

"It's about our Sergeant William Mullins Sanderson," she announced, her eyes sparkling.

"Yes?" they cried again, and Mollie added impatiently:

"Oh, Betty, don't keep us waiting. What about him?"

"Only," said Betty, speaking very slowly and distinctly, "that he's got the thing he wanted most in the world--besides his mother. This morning he received his overseas orders."

"Oh, Betty!" cried Mollie, her eyes big and round. "Isn't he simply wild about it?"

"He's delirious," said Betty simply, adding, with the ring of pride in her voice: "He seemed two inches taller when he told me about it. Oh, the spirit of our boys--the wonderful spirit of them! It can't take them long, it can't, when they once get started!"

"But Mrs. Sanderson," put in Amy gently. "How is she taking it?"

"I haven't seen her yet," said Betty, her face sobering a little. But it brightened again as she added with conviction: "I think we know enough about that little lady to be sure she'll take it standing up and be prouder than ever of her 'Willie boy.'"

"Of course she will," said Grace softly, her eyes following the red disc of the sun as it sank slowly in the west. "We're all awfully proud of them, but I don't think any of us can help wishing that it were all over instead of just beginning, and that the boys were coming home to us victorious."

"We shouldn't be human if we didn't feel that way," said Betty soberly.

"But we haven't come to the joyful part, yet. Just now we've got to keep cheerful and hold on hard to our hope and faith in the future. We owe that to the boys, the boys who are fighting, perhaps dying for us, more than we owe it to ourselves.

"But now," she added, forcing a lighter tone, "we've got a big treat before us and we're not going to think of anything but just that. Our letters, girls--we've been forgetting them."

The girls started, looked surprised, then instantly responded to the challenge of her lighter tone.

"Goodness, it's you who made us forget them, Betty Nelson," cried Grace, squeezing the Little Captain's hand fondly, then falling to with a will on her own momentarily neglected mail. "Just see," she added wickedly, holding up two letters with the coveted foreign postmark before their envious eyes, "what an advantage it is to have a brother in the army as well as a--a--"

"Well, go ahead," Betty teased, while the others laughed delightedly at her flaming color. "What is that other thing you've got besides a brother, the mere mention of whose name makes you the color of a beet?--I should say," correcting herself with a demure little smile, "the color of a flaming sunset--"

"That would be more poetic," agreed Mollie soberly, while her eyes danced.

"But either description would be correct."

"You geese," cried Grace, trying vainly to hide her flushed face behind the letter she had opened. "I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about."

"She remindeth me of the graceful ostrich," chanted Mollie cruelly, "who hideth his head and thinks thereby--"