Four Girls and a Compact | Page 2

_rest_--to a girl, they longed for it. They were all orphans, and they were all poor. The Grand Plan was ambitious, indefinite, but they could not give it up. They had wintered it and springed it, and clung to it through bright days and dark.
Suddenly Loraine tapped sharply on the table. "All in favor of spending the summer in the country say 'aye,'" she cried, "and say it hard!"
"Aye!"
"Aye!"
"Aye!"
"Aye!" appended Loraine, and said it hard. "It's a vote," she added calmly. Then, staring at each other, they sat for a little with rather frightened faces. For this thing that they had done was rather a stupendous thing. T.O. recovered first--courage was as the breath of her little lean nostrils.
"Girls, this is great!" she laughed. "_We've gone and done it!_ There's nothing left but to pack our trunks!"
"Except a few last trifles, such as deciding where to go and what to pay for it with," put in Laura Ann with soft irony. "We could decide those things on the train, I suppose--"
"Let's decide 'em on the spot," rejoined T.O. imperturbably. "Somebody propose something."
Here Billy was visited with one of her inspirations and promptly shared it with her usual generosity. "We must hunt up a place to--er--'bunk' in--just bunk and board ourselves. Of course we can't afford to be boarded--"
"Of course," in chorus.
"Well, then, one of us must go out into the waste places--oh, anywhere where the grass has room to grow and there are trees and birds and _barns_--I stipulate barns." Billy made a splendid, comprehensive gesture that took in all the points of the compass impartially. "One of us must take a few days off and go and hunt up a nice, inexpensive little Eldorado for us. There!--there, my friends, you have the solution of your knotty little problem in a nutshell. I gladly give my 'services' free."
"Who's going?" demanded practical Laura Ann. "Does anybody kindly volunteer?"
No volunteers. Silence, broken only by the chirp of the cheery little teakettle. The immense responsibility of setting the Grand Plan in motion was not to be lightly assumed. The utter vagueness of Billy's "waste places" was dismaying, to say the least. There might be many nice, inexpensive little Eldorados waiting to be "bunked" in and picnicked in, but where? The world was full of places where there were trees and birds and barns, but to pick out the particular one where four tired-out young toilers could lay down their tools and rest inexpensively, looked like a big undertaking.
Billy had settled back in her chair with an air of having done her part and washed her hands of further responsibility. The rest must do their parts now. Billy, who was the youngest and frailest of the little colony of workers, had fallen into the way of dropping asleep whenever opportunity offered; she did so now with a little sigh of contentment. Her girlish face against the faded crimson back of the chair looked startlingly white. In her sleep she moved her lips and the others caught a pathetic little "_one_-two-three-four" dropping from them. Poor Billy! She was giving a music lesson in her dreams!
Loraine made a little paper shade and shielded her pale face from the light, and Laura Ann tilted the clumsy patent rocker backward and trigged it with a book. Both their faces, tired, too, and pale, were sweet with kindness. T.O., who did queer and unexpected things, went round the table on her toes and kissed Billy's forehead openly. Her face had a puckering frown on it, oddly at variance with the kiss and with the look in her eyes. The kiss and the look were the things that mattered--the frown was a thing of insignificance.
"You poor little blessed!" she murmured.
"'Flat your b,'" murmured Billy wearily, and no one laughed. They were all laughers, but the picture of Billy toiling on monotonously in her sleep failed to appeal to them as humorous. T.O. went back silently to her seat.
What the initials T.O. stood for in the way of a name had been the subject of much guessing in the B-Hive, for the owner of the initials refused whimsically to explain them. Perhaps she would sometime when the moon was full or the wind was in the right quarter, she said. Meanwhile T.O. did well enough--as well as "Billy," anyway, or "Laura Ann"! And they fell in gayly with her whimsy and called her T.O. The nearest they had ever come to an answer to their guesses was one night when they had been discussing "talents" and comparing "callings," and T.O. had sat by, a wistful little listener and admirer. For T.O. had no talent, and who would call selling handkerchiefs from morning till night a "calling"? Even sheer, fine handkerchiefs, warranted every thread linen!
"Talentless One," she broke out startlingly. "You want