They were several miles from home and in another hour the dusk would be upon them. So the two girls struggled bravely on through the thick woods, though it was difficult to walk abreast in the narrow path. Barbara insisted she was better with each step, but Mollie knew otherwise. With every foot of ground they covered Bab limped more and more painfully. Now and then when her injured foot pressed too heavily on the rough ground, she caught her breath and swallowed a groan. Mollie realized they would not get home before midnight at the rate they were now moving.
"Rest here, Bab," she insisted, when they came to an opening in the woods where the shade was less dense. "I think I see a place over there that must lead into a road. I will run on ahead and find some one to come back to help you."
Bab was glad to sit down. Her foot was swelling and growing more painful every moment; her pulses were throbbing. She was almost crying, but she would never mention surrender; she was not sorry, however, when Mollie suggested that she should rest.
Mollie sped through the woods as fast as she could run. As soon as her back was turned, Bab closed her eyes. "How glad I am to rest," she thought gratefully.
In the half hour that Barbara Thurston waited alone her mind wandered to many of her own hopes and fears. First, she couldn't help worrying over her mother. Then, she thought of her own ambition. More than anything in the world she longed to go to Vassar College. In two years more she would be ready to enter, but where was the money to come from? Barbara realized that her mother would never be able to pay her expenses from their small income; nevertheless, she meant to go. The Kingsbridge High School offered a scholarship at Vassar to the girl who passed the best final examinations during the four years of its course. Barbara had won the highest honors in her freshman and sophomore years, but she had two more winters of hard work ahead of her.
"I wonder," she thought at last, "if I can persuade Ruth to go to college with me?" Then she must have fallen into a little doze.
Readers of the preceding volume, "The Automobile Girls at Newport," will remember how the famous little club, known as "The Automobile Girls" came to be organized, and they are familiar with the exciting and humorous incidents of that journey in Ruth Stuart's motor car. There were many adventures along the way, including mysterious encounters with a gentlemanly young rascal, known to the police as "The Boy Raffles." The same "Raffles" afterwards turned up at Newport, where the girls for several weeks led a life of thrilling interest. "The Automobile Girls" it was who caught "Raffles" red-handed, and who saved Bab's snobbish cousin, Gladys Le Baron, from falling in love with him.