"It's for--Cora," he announced. "Now who on earth knew that Cora Kimball was coming down to Clover!" They all stood spellbound! That a letter for Cora should hang there in a cottage closed up--certainly the doors had not been opened! Cora took the folded paper from Jack's hand. "More--ghosts!" sighed Belle. "Somehow this whole trip has been----" "Ghost-bound!" interrupted Walter. "Well, what does this particular ghost want, Cora?" "It's a note--from Rose and Nellie," she announced. "They have been here--and--wait, let me read it." "Dear Miss Kimball," she read aloud. "We came to your cottage last night. I hope you will forgive us. We did not sleep in any bed, but slept on the floor. We washed all the dishes this morning, and cleaned down the pantry shelves to pay for our night's lodging. We are dreadfully discouraged, and when you see Aunt Delia will you just tell her we have drowned ourselves on account of that piece she put in the paper about us. We did not take Miss Schenk's earrings. Your true friends, Rose and Nellie Catron." "Oh!" gasped Belle. "Isn't that perfectly dreadful!" "Do you really think--they have drowned themselves?" asked Bess. Jack was reading the letter over, and the other boys were helping him decipher it. Cora waited their opinion. "Isn't it strange," she said, as Jack laid the paper on the table, "every place we go they leave some clue, and yet they are just clever enough to escape us." "But are they dead, do you think?" asked Belle, sobbing. "Not much," declared Ed firmly. "They only threw that in to put Ramsy off their track. You know that account in the Chelton paper claimed that Mrs. Ramsy said she would put the girls in the Reform School when she found them. Now what girl is going to walk into that sort of trap?" "Wasn't it good of the poor things to wash all the dishes," remarked Bess, who was now looking at the clean porcelain on the closet shelves. "If they had only waited we might have hired them, since, for some unknown reason, Nettie has not arrived." "And we could have helped them keep out of sight, too," added Belle, to whom any thought other than that of suicide was a welcome change. "I do wish we could find them! Don't you think we ought to search, before they get away--to the ocean?" "Now, my dear young ladies," began Ed, assuming a comical air, "since I am to be head waiter, steward and all but butler here, I insist that the thought of foreign affairs, tinged with suicide and desperation, be tabooed from--our midst," and he actually opened the piano. "Please get your partners for----" But the melody he struck up was not intended for a dance. It was the old, familiar: "No Place Like Home!"