“So you’re going to show me at last, dear?” But Sally hesitated a moment.
“Doris,” she began, “this is my secret--and Genevieve’s--and I never thought I’d tell any one about it. It’s the only secret I ever had worth anything, but I’m going to tell you,--well, because I--I think so much of you. Will you solemnly promise--cross your heart--that you’ll never tell any one?”
Doris gazed straight into Sally’s somewhat troubled eyes. “I don’t need to ‘cross my heart,’ Sally. I just give you my word of honor I won’t, unless sometime you wish it. I’ve not breathed a word of the fact that you _had_ a secret, even to Mother. And I’ve never kept anything from her before.” And this simple statement completely satisfied Sally.
“Come on, then,” she said. “Follow Genevieve and me, and we’ll give you the surprise of your life.”
She grasped her small sister’s hand and led the way, and Doris obediently followed. To her surprise, however, they did not scramble up the sandy pine-covered slope as usual, but picked their way, instead, along the tiny strip of beach on the farther side of the point where the river ate into the shore in a great, sweeping cove. After trudging along in this way for nearly a quarter of a mile, Sally suddenly struck up into the woods through a deep little ravine. It was a wild scramble through the dense underbrush and over the boughs of fallen pine trees. Sally and Genevieve, more accustomed to the journey, managed to keep well ahead of Doris, who was scratching her hands freely and doing ruinous damage to her clothes plunging through the thorny tangle. At last the two, who were a distance of not more than fifty feet ahead of her, halted, and Sally called out:
“Now stand where you are, turn your back to us and count ten--slowly. Don’t turn round and look till you’ve finished counting.” Doris obediently turned her back, and slowly and deliberately “counted ten.” Then she turned about again to face them.
To her complete amazement, there was not a trace of them to be seen!
Thinking they had merely slipped down and hidden in the undergrowth to tease her, she scrambled to the spot where they had stood. But they were not there. She had, moreover, heard no sound of their progress, no snapping, cracking or breaking of branches, no swish of trailing through the vines and high grass. They could not have advanced twenty feet in any direction, in the short time she had been looking away from them. Of both these facts she was certain. Yet they had disappeared as completely as if the earth had opened and swallowed them. Where, in the name of all mystery, could they be?