While the girls listened to Nancy’s strange story of the beautiful injured woman, Billie collected and replaced the jewels in the box with the card, and packed it in the bottom of her suit case.
In another ten minutes the motor party was on the road again, the younger members somewhat sobered by the secret responsibility which had been thrust upon them.
Shell Island is really only an island in name. A narrow creek which fills and empties with the incoming and outgoing tides divides it from the mainland. A bridge spans this chasm over which flows a constant stream of motor and driving parties from all the villages and summer resorts up and down the coast.
Just at sundown, as the “Comet” took the steep road down the cliff to the bridge, a big touring car shot past.
“Oh, dear,” exclaimed Nancy, “I did hope we would leave all care behind when we came away, and now I am perfectly certain that Belle Rogers was sitting on the front seat of that automobile. I suppose she’ll be floating around the ballroom in blue chiffons this evening.”
“Is she a care?” asked Billie, who had a placid and rather masculine way of forgetting all about the people she didn’t like.
“Oh, I don’t mind her, only she always makes me feel like a rag picker’s daughter.”
“I think she’s over-dressed,” put in Billie. “I should feel utterly foolish with all that finery and jewelry on me. When papa and I used to buy my clothes, he would say: ‘Suppose we stick to plain white, daughter, and skip the furbelows. We can’t go very far wrong if we do that, and if my little daughter begins to put on ruffles and puffles and falals without anybody’s advice but mine, I’m afraid she might be taken for a walking fashion plate and some one will try to stand her up in a shop window.”
“I think you have the prettiest dresses I ever saw, Billie, but I am glad Miss Campbell has persuaded you to stop dressing so much like a boy. Lace collars are lots more becoming than those stiff linen ones.”
“They were chokers,” answered Billie, good-naturedly, as the car drew up at the steps of the hotel immediately behind the automobile which had passed it on the road.
Belle and her party were waiting on the piazza, the women in long pongee coats with the very latest motor bonnets and veils.