"I'll have to go home, of course," she said suddenly, breaking a silence filled with unhappy thoughts. "I don't know that I'll be any good, but I can at least comfort mother. I'm sorry," she gave them a wistful, apologetic little glance that went straight to their hearts and brought the tears to their eyes, "to break up the party." "You darling," cried Betty, trying to laugh and not making a very great success of it, "do you think we care a rap about our old party? Only," she added thoughtfully, "as you say yourself, I don't see that you can do very much good by going home." "I could comfort mother," repeated Mollie, in a flat tone, as though she were repeating a lesson. "But she said not to come," suggested Grace. "She said she was doing everything possible--" "I know," interrupted Mollie, wearily. "Of course she would say not to come. And I suppose," she added, dabbing impatiently at her eyes, "all I'd do would be to weep anyway, and make things about ten times worse." "Do you want your lunch inside or out here?" Mrs. Ford asked from the doorway and the girls jumped to their feet. "Here we are, letting you do all the work again," cried Betty self-reproachfully. "I guess we'd rather have it out here, but we'll bring it out ourselves. Please go over there, get into the swing, and don't stir until we say you may." Betty had a pretty manner, half of deference, half of _camaraderie_, with older people that made them love her. Mrs. Ford patted her cheek with a little smile and obeyed her command while the three girls ran into the kitchen to bring out the sandwiches and cake that she had already prepared. And all the time Mollie sat motionless, staring out over the ocean, apparently unconscious of everything that was going on around her. "Little Dodo and Paul," she said over and over to herself. "What has happened to them? Oh, I must go home, I must!" "Come to your lunch," called Betty. After lunch Mollie began to take a less gloomy view of the situation and hope, which in youth can never long be forced into the background, began to revive. "In the first place," Betty argued, as she began to clear away the dishes and Amy rose to help her, "it couldn't have been an accident, or your mother would have read about it in the papers. The children are old enough to tell their names and where they live." "I know," said Mollie, while the troublesome tears welled to her eyes again. "But it's possible they may have been unconscious, and then they wouldn't be able to tell anything." "But there would have been at least an announcement describing the children," Amy argued in support of Betty. "And, anyway, pretty nearly everybody in Deepdale knows the twins," Grace added.