preferred to choose the subject herself.

“After we’ve had breakfast and cleaned things up here. It was very nice of the Worcesters to let us use their camp, and we must leave it looking just as nice as when we came.”

“Are they coming back here this summer?”

“The Worcesters? No, I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure, though, that they have invited some friends of theirs to use the camp next week and stay as long as they like.”

“I hope their friends will please the Halsted Camp crowd better than we did,” said Dolly, sarcastically. “The Worcesters ought to be very careful only to let people come here who are a little better socially than those girls. Then they’d probably be satisfied.”

“Now, don’t hold a grudge against all those girls, Dolly,” said Eleanor, smiling. “Gladys Cooper was really the ringleader in all the trouble they tried to make for us, and you’ve had your revenge on her. On all of them, for that matter.”

“Oh, Miss Eleanor, if you could only have seen them when I threw that basket full of mice among them! I never saw such a scared lot of girls in my life!”

“That was a pretty mean trick,” said Eleanor. “I don’t think what they did to bother us deserved such a revenge as that, even if I believed in revenge, anyhow. I don’t because it usually hurts the people who get it more than the victims.”

Bessie looked at Dolly sharply, but, if she meant to say anything, Eleanor herself anticipated her remark.

“Now come on, Dolly, own up!” she said. “Didn’t you feel pretty bad when you heard Gladys and Marcia were lost in the woods last night? Didn’t you think that it was because you’d got the best of the girls that they turned against Gladys, and so drove her into taking that foolish night walk in the woods?”

“Oh, I did—I did!” cried Dolly. “And I told Bessie so last night, too. I never would have forgiven myself if anything really serious had happened to those two girls.”

“That’s just it, Dolly. You may think that revenge is a joke, perhaps, as you meant yours to be, but you never can tell how far it’s going, nor what the final effect is going to be.”

“I’m beginning to see that, Miss Mercer.”

“I know you are, Dolly. You were lucky—as lucky as Gladys and Marcia. You were particularly lucky, because, after all, it was your pluck in going into that cave, when you didn’t know what sort of danger you might run into, that found them. So you had a salve for your conscience right then. But often and often it wouldn’t have happened that way. You might very well have had to remember always that your revenge, though you thought it was such a trifling thing, had had a whole lot of pretty serious results.”

“Well, I really am beginning to feel a little sorry,” admitted Dolly, “though Gladys acted just as if she was insulted because we found them. She said she and Marcia would have been all right in that cave if they’d stayed there until morning.”

“I think she’ll have reason to change her mind,” said Eleanor. “She’d have found herself pretty uncomfortable this morning with nothing to eat. And she’s in for a bad cold, unless I’m mistaken, and it might very well have been pneumonia if they’d had to stay out all night.”

“She’s a softy!” declared Dolly, scornfully. “I’ll bet Bessie and I could have spent the night there and been all right, too, after it was all over.”

“You and Bessie are both unusually strong and healthy, Dolly. It may not be her fault that she’s a softy, as you call her. The Camp Fire pays a whole lot of attention to health. That’s why Health is one of the words that we use to make up Wo-he-lo. Work, and Health, and Love. Because you can’t work properly, and love properly, unless you are healthy.”

“I suppose what happened to Gladys last night was one of the things you were talking about when you wanted us to be patient, wasn’t it?”

“What do you mean, Dolly?”

“Why, when you said that pride went before a fall, and that she’d be sure to have something unpleasant happen if we only let her alone, and didn’t try to get even ourselves?”

“Well, it looks like it, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t get much satisfaction out of seeing people punished that way, though,” admitted Dolly, after a moment’s thought. “It seems to me—well, listen, Miss Eleanor. Suppose someone did something awfully nice for me. It wouldn’t be right, would it, for me just to say to myself, ‘Oh, well, something nice will happen to her.’ She might have some piece of good fortune, but I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. I’d want to do something nice myself to show that I was grateful.”

“Of course you would,” said Eleanor, who saw the point Dolly was trying to make and admired her power of working out a logical proposition.

“Well, then, if that’s true, why shouldn’t it be true if someone does something hateful to me? I don’t take any credit for the pleasant things that happen to people who are nice to me, so why should I feel satisfied because the hateful ones have some piece of bad luck that I didn’t have anything to do with, either?”

“That’s a perfectly good argument as far as it goes, Dolly. But the trouble is that it doesn’t go far enough. You’ve got a false step in it. Can’t you see where she goes wrong, Bessie?”

“I think I can, Miss Eleanor,” said Bessie. “It’s that we ought not to be glad when people are in trouble, even if they are mean to us, isn’t it? But we are glad, and ought to be, when nice people have good luck. So the two cases aren’t the same a bit, are they?”

“Right!” said Eleanor, heartily. “Think that over a bit, Dolly. You’ll see the point pretty soon, and then maybe you’ll understand the whole business better.”

Just then the girls whose turn it had been to prepare breakfast came to the door of the Living Camp, which contained the dining-room and the kitchen, and a blast on a horn announced that breakfast was ready.

“Come on! We’ll eat our next meal sitting around a camp fire in the woods, if that forest fire has left any woods where we’re going,” announced Eleanor. “So we want to make this meal a good one. No telling what sort of places we’ll find on our tramp.”

“I bet it will be good fun, no matter what they’re like,” said Margery Burton, one of the other members of the Camp Fire. She was a Fire-Maker, the second rank of the Camp Fire. First are the Wood-Gatherers, to which Bessie and Dolly belonged; then the Fire-Makers, and finally, and next to the Guardian, whom they serve as assistants, the Torch-Bearers. Margery hoped soon to be made a Torch-Bearer, and had an ambition to become a Guardian herself as soon as Miss Eleanor and the local council of the National Camp Fire decided that she was qualified for the work.

“Oh, you’d like any old thing just because you had to stand for it, Margery, whether it was any good or not,” said Dolly.

“Well, isn’t that a good idea? Why, I even manage to get along with you, Dolly! Sometimes I like you quite well. And anyone who could stand for you!”

Dolly laughed as loudly as the rest. She had been pretty thoroughly spoiled, but her association with the other girls in the Camp Fire had taught her to take a joke when at was aimed at her, unlike most people who are fond of making jokes at the expense of others, and of teasing them. She recognized that she had fairly invited Margery’s sharp reply.

“We’ll have to hurry