“Stop quarreling, girls, and answer my question,” said Betty, sitting up straight and regarding delightedly a vista of flying hills and woodland greenery. “I asked you a few minutes ago if you had ever seen so wonderful a day?” “Yes, plenty of ’em,” returned Mollie, as she took a sharp curve on two wheels. “If you weren’t too lazy to notice anything, Betty Nelson, you would see that there is a storm coming up. Look at those clouds over there in the east.” “Oh, you’re a kill-joy!” cried Betty, cocking an optimistic eye up at the sky. “It’s only one teeny little cloud anyway, and who cares for clouds when the boys are coming home?” Both Amy and Grace felt a breathless little tug at their hearts at the joyful challenge in Betty’s words, but Mollie, with a perverseness that was sometimes characteristic of her, refused to be too happy. “Who says they’re coming home?” she asked. “Now you’re only guessing.” “Guessing!” cried Betty indignantly. “What do you mean! guessing? The war is over, isn’t it?” “Yes; and has been for quite a while,” Mollie responded dryly. “But that doesn’t say that the boys are coming home right away!!” “We don’t care about the right away,” interrupted Amy, with a quiet happiness in her face that made Betty hug her impulsively. “We can wait patiently, now that we know they are safe.” “It’s all right for you to talk about patience, Amy,” retorted Mollie, throttling her engine and sliding at breakneck speed down a long hill without the thought of using a brake. A brake to Mollie meant something to be used at the last minute when she couldn’t think of anything else to do. “You’re an angel, but I’m not!” “No, indeed!” said Grace, so emphatically that the girls in the tonneau chuckled and Mollie looked at her threateningly. “For goodness’ sake, don’t waste time looking at me,” Grace pleaded, as they bounced into a hole in the road and out again, fairly jouncing the breath from the girls’ bodies. “Keep your eyes on the road, Mollie dear, We’re not ready to die yet.” “Well, look out, or you may! ready or not,” threatened Mollie darkly, as the car skidded around another precipitous turn and the girls saw with relief a long stretch of flat road before them. “Just the same the boys must be coming home before very long,” said Amy, quietly returning to the subject. “And when they do come we’ll have to give them some sort of big party or something, girls.” “Of course we will,” said Grace, munching contentedly on a chocolate. “Something that will make the people in Deepdale sit up and take notice.” “We-el! I don’t know,” objected Betty thoughtfully. “They say that the few soldier boys who have come home object to any sort of fuss being made over them. They seem to want to forget everything that has happened ‘over there,’ and any sort of celebration brings the whole thing vividly before them again.”