When in turn this game lost its savor, the resourceful Mrs. Dore designed paper houses, these architectural wonders, made from the endless piles of rejected paper boxes which the under-the-eaves closets of the Little House contained. The Little Six were as much delighted with the Little House and its neighborhood as the Big Six. But unlike the Big Six--with the exception of Betsy--they were content with near-by joys. But Betsy had never recovered from her tendency to run away. Once or twice she slipped off the House Rock and started to make through the green forests in any direction that occurred to her. But she was always caught. Caught--because after her first straying, Mrs. Dore put on the efficient little Molly the burden of keeping a watch upon her. And Molly watched Betsy--watched her with the same quiet, supervising care which she had always brought to her guardianship of the self-willed, stubborn Timmie. After a while, astute Betsy came to realize that a guard was always near and, for the time being ceased to stray. “She’ll do it sometime,” Dicky prophesied again and again. “She always has and she always will.” The children recovered from their first attack of sunburn; but they succumbed to another and another. The second attack was not so painful and the third was scarcely noticed. The red in their faces deepened to a brown which was like the protection of armor against the sun. The blue-eyed and fair-haired ones--Maida and the two Lathrops--freckled; but Rosie turned a deeper rose-bronze every day; Dicky was fast changing to the color of a coffee bean and Arthur threatened to become pitch-black. As for the Little Six, Maida said they were “just colonies of freckles”; and colonies in which layer had grown on layer. “I can’t believe you are the same children I saw in the city a little over two weeks ago,” Buffalo Westabrook remarked on his second visit. “First I was afraid you were working too hard. When Maida sent me the program of your work, it looked to me as if you were undertaking altogether too much, but you certainly thrive on it.” “Well we play more than we work,” Rosie explained. “I never was so hungry in all my life,” Laura declared, “and I fall asleep the moment my head touches the pillow.” “All right,” Buffalo Westabrook laughed. “You’re doing so well I’ll leave it all in your hands.” He always surveyed both the flower garden and the vegetable garden when he came--surveyed them with much interest. He always went into the barn and made an examination of the boys’ quarters. And so with work and play, July wore itself away. CHAPTER XII BETSY’S FIND