small group save Lance McClain was aware.

"Please stay, Don," Tory begged, moving forward and standing beside
him. She scarcely came up to his shoulder. "Edith Linder has gone to
Miss Frean's cottage to ask her to come to Kara at once. She is to try
to telephone for your father. If not, one of us must ride in to town
for him. But perhaps he might want you to be here when he arrives in
case there is anything to be done, if Kara has to be lifted. Oh, I
don't know anything, except that I am dreadfully worried over her."

Don softened.

"Oh, of course if there is any chance Lance or I can be of further use
we'll be glad to stay. You ought to go to bed, Tory, and not wait for
father."

Tory shook her head. Her face was whiter than usual from anxiety and
fatigue, yet Donald McClain liked her appearance.

His brothers and other people might insist there were several girls in
the Girl Scout Troop of the Eagle's Wing far prettier than Victoria
Drew--Teresa Peterson, with her half Italian beauty, his own sister,
Dorothy, Joan Peters, with her regular features and patrician air. Don
knew that Tory possessed a charm and vividness, a quickness of thought
and a grace of movement more attractive to him than ordinary beauty.

Forgetting their companions, they walked off together, leaving the
others to follow.

"If you only knew how I have been longing to show you our camp in
Beechwood Forest, Don! Please say you think it is wonderful," Tory
pleaded.

CHAPTER III

THEIR CAMP

They were seated along the edge of the lake, six girls and their two
visitors. The water was a still, dim blue reflection of the sky with
one deep shadow from the hill of pines. Away from the hill and the
lake stood the forest of beechwood trees.

In an open space on a little rise of ground half within, half without
the forest, lay the summer camp of the Girl Scouts of the Eagle's
Wing.

A little brown house built of logs was almost entirely covered with
vines, a tangle of woodbine and honeysuckle and wistaria. Only from
the windows and the door had the vines been cut away. The house looked
extremely ancient, older than the slender beeches that formed a
semicircle to the rear and left. Beyond the door, thick with deep
green shade on this midsummer morning, towered a single giant beech
which appeared to have moved out a few yards from its forest shelter
to act as a sentinel for the log cabin.

The cabin had been erected so many years befor