Priscilla snuggled closer. "You're awful comforting. A person gets scared at night." "A person does, indeed." "Not so much when you've got company," said Priscilla. The warmth of the little body in her arms struck through to Elliott's own shivering heart. "Not half so much when you've got company," she acknowledged. CHAPTER XI MISSING Sure enough, in the morning came better news. Father Bob's face, when he turned around from the telephone, told that, even before he opened his lips. "Sidney is holding his own," he said. You may think that wasn't much better news, but it meant a great deal to the Camerons. "Sidney is holding his own," they told every one who inquired, and their faces were hopeful. If Father Bob had any fears, he kept them to himself. The rest of the Camerons were young and it didn't seem possible to them that Sidney could do anything but get well. Last night had been a bad dream, that was all. The next morning's message had the word "better" in it. "Little" stood before "better," but nobody, not even Father Bob, paid much attention to "little." Sidney was better. It was a week before Mother Jess wrote that the doctors pronounced him out of danger and that she and Laura would soon be home. Meanwhile, many things had happened. You might have thought that Sidney's illness was enough trouble to come to the Camerons at one time, but as Bruce quoted with a twist in his smile, "It never rains but it pours." This time Bruce himself got the message which came from the War Department and read: You are informed that Lieutenant Peter Fearing has been reported missing since September fifteenth. Letter follows. The Camerons felt as badly as though Peter Fearing had been their own brother. "The telegram doesn't say that he's dead," Trudy declared, over and over again. "Maybe he's a prisoner," Tom suggested. "Perhaps he had to come down in a wood somewhere," Henry speculated, "and will get back to our lines." "The government makes mistakes sometimes," Stannard said. "There was a woman in Upton--" He went on with a long story about a woman whose son was reported killed in France on the very day the boy had been in his mother's house on furlough from a cantonment. There were a great many interesting and ingenious details to the story, but nobody paid much attention to them. "So you never can tell," Stannard wound up. "No, you never can tell," Bruce agreed, but he didn't look convinced. Something, he was quite sure, was wrong with Pete. "Don't anybody write Mother Jess," he said. "She and Laura have enough to worry about with Sid." "What if they see it in the papers?" Elliott asked. "They're busy. Ten to one they won't see it, since it isn't head-lined on the front page. Wait till we get the letter." "How soon do you suppose the letter will come?" Gertrude wished to know. "'Letter follows,'" Henry read from the yellow slip which the postman delivered from the telegraph office. "That means right away, I should say."