The young soldier accompanied them back to the road.  After thanking him for the information he had given them, the girls climbed into their cars and headed toward home, leaving Wesley Travers still standing in the road and looking after them thoughtfully.

“A mighty nice bunch of girls,” thought the latter.  “Especially the little brown-haired one.  They seemed rather interested in that dotty old professor too.  Lucky fellow to have four girls like that interested in him!” After this remark he started off toward home.

Luckily for the girls, the next few days were so crowded with preparations for the trip to Wild Rose Lodge that they had not much time to dwell on the poor old professor and his misfortunes.

Only at night would they sometimes dream queer dreams in which wild-eyed men went around smashing everything in sight and a little cottage stood lonely and desolate and ghostlike amid a silent forest of trees.

After a night like this the girls were always glad to awake and find the sunshine streaming cheerfully in their windows.  And they would throw themselves with more than usual energy into the activities of the day.  Yet try as they would, they could never quite blot the tragedy from their minds.

On the afternoon of the day before they were to start for Moonlight Falls, the girls were gathered in Betty’s garage at the back of the house, where the Little Captain was giving her car one last overhauling to make sure that it was in perfect condition for the trip.  Mollie suddenly espied the postman coming down the street.

Now the postman was a very popular man with the girls, for the reason that he brought almost daily some message from the boys on the other side.  He sympathized with the chums so fully in their desire for letters with the red triangle in one corner that he actually confessed to a guilty feeling when he had no missive of the sort for them.

So now, as Mollie ran toward him with outstretched hand, he held up to her delighted gaze not only one letter, but four.

“One for each of you,” he said beamingly, as Mollie reached him.  “I thought that probably I would find all four of you at one place, so I kept the letters together.”

“Oh, thanks, it is awfully good of you,” said Mollie absent-mindedly, as she took the welcome letters and hurried with them back to the garage.  “One for each of us, just think of that!” she cried to the questioning girls.  “It looks as if the boys had all written at the same time.  Put down your duster, Betty, for goodness’ sake, and read what Allen has to say.  Maybe,” she added hopefully, as she ripped her envelope open, “they will tell us something definite about coming home.”

So down the girls sat in the midst of dust cloths and more or less dirt to find what the boys had written.  For a moment only the crackling of paper broke the silence.  Then Grace gave a little joyful cry.