lie urged.

"Oh, is that so!" exclaimed Grace, with as near an approach to
"snippiness" as she ever permitted herself.

"Oh, I'll carry the basket," said gentle Amy, always anxious to avoid a
quarrel.

"You'll do nothing of the sort!" insisted Betty, who had, like the
Little Captain she was, arranged the commissary department on lines she
intended to see carried out.

"Oh, well, if we're going, let's go!" exclaimed Mollie. "We're wasting
the best part of the day getting ready."

It was the day after Mollie had proposed that the outdoor girls go on a
little picnic, and her plan had been enthusiastically adopted. As she
had said, the affair of the diamonds was getting on the nerves of them
all. They had stuck too close to the house, and there was a "jumpiness"
and fault-finding spirit seldom manifested by the four chums.

They were to take their lunch, and spend the day on the beach, or in the
scrubby woods, not far away, taking to a boat if they felt so inclined.

The boys had offered to take them out for a cruise in the _Pocohontas_,
but the girls felt that they would rather be by themselves on this
occasion.

Accordingly lunch baskets had been packed and now this glorious summer
morning they were about to start. The boys, their kind offer refused,
had gone off on a fishing jaunt--that is, all but Will, and he had not
returned from Boston. Grace had a hasty note from him in which he stated
that work connected with his new duties would keep him busy for a week
or so, after which he hoped to join his friends at Edgemere.

"No news of a diamond robbery around Boston," he wrote, in a letter.
"I've written to a fellow in New York about it, though. Sometimes the
police keep those things out of the papers for reasons of their own.
Maybe they think the robbers won't know the diamonds have been taken, if
nothing is printed about it, at least that's the way it looks."

At any rate Will reported no news, and Mr. Nelson had pretty much the
same story to tell. His wife had written to him about the men in the
cellar, and he had advised getting some fisherman of the neighborhood to
stay on guard every night, until he could come down to Ocean View again.

"We might get Old Tin-Back," suggested Betty.

"It would only make me nervous," her mother said. "I don't believe the
men will bother us again."

"Well, they won't find the diamonds down cellar if they do pay us
another visit," Betty had said. She had, after some though