Two weeks before Bab had walked slowly home to Laurel Cottage at about three o’clock one November afternoon with a great pile of books under her arm.

On the front porch of their little cottage she found her mother and Mollie, greatly excited.  A telegram had just come from Ruth Stuart.  The “Automobile Girls” were invited to visit Ruth’s cousin in Washington, D.C.  Ruth wished them to start at the end of the week.

Bab’s face flushed with pleasure at the news.  She had not been with her beloved Ruth since the Easter before.  Then the color died out of her face and her cheeks showed an unaccustomed pallor.

“I am so sorry, Mother,” Bab responded.  “I would give anything in the world to see Ruth.  But I simply can’t stop school just now, or I shall lose the scholarship.  Mollie, you can accept Ruth’s invitation.  You and Grace Carter can go to Washington together.  You won’t mind going without me.”

“I shall not stir a single step without you,” blue-eyed Mollie returned firmly.  “And Mother thinks you can go!”

Mollie and Mrs. Thurston, aided by Bab’s teachers, at last persuaded Barbara to take a few weeks’ holiday.  Bab could study to make up for lost time during the Christmas holidays.  For no one, except the young woman herself, doubted Barbara’s ability to win the desired Vassar scholarship.

And so it was arranged that Bab and Mollie should go with Ruth to Washington.  Bab had grown taller and more slender in the past few months.  Her brown braids are now always coiled about her graceful head.  Her hair was parted in the middle, although a few little curls still escaped in the old, careless fashion.

Ruth Stuart, too, was looking sweeter and fresher than ever, and was the same ingenuous, unspoiled girl, whose sunny disposition no amount of wealth and fashion could change.

Readers of the first volume in the “Automobile Girls Series,” entitled “The Automobile Girls At Newport,” will recall how, nearly two years ago, Ruth Stuart, with her father and her aunt, Miss Sallie Stuart, came from their home in far away Chicago to spend the summer in Kingsbridge, New Jersey.  The day that Barbara Thurston stopped a pair of runaway horses and saved Ruth Stuart from death she did not dream that she had turned the first page in the history of the “Automobile Girls.”  A warm friendship sprang up between Ruth and Bab, and a little later Ruth Stuart invited Barbara, her younger sister, Mollie Thurston, and their friend, Grace Carter, to take a trip to Newport in her own, red automobile with Ruth herself as chauffeur and her aunt, Miss Sallie Stuart, as chaperon.

Exciting days at Newport followed, and the four girls brought to bay the “Boy Raffles,” the cracksman, who had puzzled the fashionable world!  There were many thrilling adventures connected with the discovery of this “society thief,” and the “Automobile Girls” proved themselves capable of meeting whatever emergencies sprang up in their path.