“Didn’t it say something about James Dempsey, too, Betty?” asked Mollie, fairly snatching the paper from her chum.  “Yes, here it is.  Do you suppose that can be his other son?”

Betty shook her head soberly.

“I don’t know,” she said.  “Of course he didn’t tell us the name of his other son, but it might easily be James.  Oh, I hope it isn’t so!” she added, her heart aching for the lonely old man whose one big interest in life was his boys.  “I do hope there has been some mistake.”

“I guess we all do,” said Amy gently, adding with a sigh:  “But I’m afraid there isn’t very much hope of it.  The Government is usually right when it comes to things like that.”

“Not always,” Mollie retorted quickly.  “Look at the time they reported that Allen was among the missing and he wasn’t at all.  That is the only mistake we happen to know about, but I fancy there are plenty of others.”

At mention of that dreadful time when she had read Allen’s name in the long list of the missing, Betty experienced again something of the emotion she had felt at that time.

She saw again in imagination the dark room where she had gone to be by herself, she heard the thunder of the surf on the rocks outside and the rumble of the thunder overhead.  She saw once more the vision of Allen as she had seen it then.  Allen stretched out cold and dead perhaps on some shell-ridden battlefield or perhaps, more terrible still, a prisoner in the hands of the Hun, suffering unspeakable torture——­

“But this is not as bad as though the boys were missing,” she said suddenly, speaking her thought aloud.  “At least the professor will know that his sons are dead.”

The girls started and looked at Betty queerly.

“I was thinking of Allen,” she explained in response to their rather startled glances, “and the time when we thought he was missing.  If this thing is true about Professor Dempsey’s sons I think I shall be able to sympathize with him, almost better than any of you.”

“I guess you will, honey,” said Mollie soberly, putting an arm about her chum.  “It was a terrible time for us all—­ there at Bluff Point.  But it was almost worth the suffering when we found out that Allen was alive and well and never had been missing at all.  Do you remember how happy we all were then?”

“Happy,” Betty repeated, shaking off her depression and smiling at the memory.  “I’ll say we were the happiest girls on earth—­ especially after we recovered the twins.  But what,” she said, coming back to the present subject, “are we going to do about Professor Dempsey?  We ought to do something, you know.”

“I suppose we ought,” said Grace, a little vaguely, “but I’m sure I don’t know just what.”

“I think,” suggested Amy practically, “that the best thing would be to try to find out first of all whether these poor boys who were killed are really Professor Dempsey’s sons or not.”