“And now,” said Will, “after all that, the boys will come back to find their dad gone, heaven knows where, dead perhaps——­”

“Oh, I wonder if there isn’t some way we can follow him and find out at least what has happened to him?” broke in Amy earnestly.  “It seems dreadful just to sit back and not even try to help,”

“I don’t see what we can do,” said Will judicially, just as Mrs. Irving appeared in the doorway.  “We will postpone the discussion for the present anyway,” he added, in a different tone, rising with alacrity and dusting off his uniform.  “Something tells me that lunch is waiting.  Come, let us eat!”

So ended all serious discussion for that day, and the girls and boys gave themselves up to the delight of being together again.  Only Betty’s thoughts seemed to wander at times and she had to be brought back by sundry mischievous and significant remarks from the young folks.

Worn out with fun, the young soldiers slept like tops that night in their improvised beds and rose the next morning professing to feel like “two year olds” and ready for whatever new fun and adventure the day might bring them.

And for the first night since their arrival at Wild Rose Lodge the girls slept soundly without being bothered by the haunting fear of the “Thing”—­ at least, so they said.

That day they wandered through the woods together, searching for some sign of their strange visitor, but found not a trace of anything unusual and alarming.

“I’m really beginning to believe that you girls have let your imaginations run away from you,” Will remarked, when they sat about the living-room after a satisfying supper, just luxuriating in idleness.

“Or perhaps the gentleman has been frightened away by our coming,” Roy suggested in a superior tone that made the girls want to throw something at him.  “Perhaps he is afraid of the uniform of the U. S. A.”

“He may be afraid of the uniform,” sniffed Mollie scathingly.  “But he certainly couldn’t be afraid of you.”

“Now you don’t mean that, you know you don’t,” laughed Roy, drawing her down beside him on the couch and holding her there with an iron grip of his brown fingers.  “Say you didn’t, like a pretty little girl, and I’ll let you go.”

“I won’t say any such——­” Mollie began, then suddenly her gaze stiffened into such a stare of wonder, and even alarm, that it made the girls fairly hold their breath.

“Mollie, what is it?” demanded Roy commandingly.

“Over there!” she shrieked.  “At the window, Roy!  Do you see it?”

CHAPTER XXII

 Tragedy

There, pressed so close to the pane of the window that the nose was flattened grotesquely, eyes wildly staring, hair disheveled, was a face that even in that tense moment the girls recognized—­ the face of Professor Dempsey!

It took the boys perhaps a second to fling out of the room, jump down the steps of the porch and circle the house to the window.