ly
appreciative and inordinately grateful to you for your wonderful
foresight and insistence."

"Is she calling me names?" cried Mollie threateningly. "For if she is, I
should like to remark for the benefit of each and every one that I am
still in possession of the wheel, and a swift and terrible doom shall
overtake--"

"Rave on, rave on, Macbeth," chuckled Betty, adding with a whimsical smile
and a quickened heart beat as she fingered the letter she had so carefully
placed under the rest: "There's no use, Mollie dear--you can't start a
rumpus now. It can't be done. We're all too good-natured."

"That's the way Frank talks after a particularly good meal," chuckled
Mollie.

"And I never saw boys who were so absolutely crazy about hot biscuits,"
sighed Amy. "If you gave them enough hot biscuits, they didn't seem to
know or care whether they had anything else or not."

"Yes, somebody was always stirring up biscuit dough when we were at Pine
Island," agreed Grace, her eyes dreamy. "I think one of us should have
invented a patent stirrer--just in self-defense!"

"Just the same, I'd wager anything," cried Betty, with a thrill in her
voice and the hint of tears behind the brightness of her eyes, "that there
isn't one of us who wouldn't be willing to make biscuits from morning
till night if we only had the boys here to eat them."

"Oh, wouldn't we!" cried Amy hungrily. "I shouldn't care if I turned into
a biscuit!"

They laughed at that, but the laugh was not scornful, for their hearts
were very full and tender.

"Sha'n't we stop here?" Mollie asked, after they had ridden a long, long
way in silence. "It's private enough--"

"Oh, yes, yes," the others interrupted her eagerly, and as Mollie guided
the car over to the side of the road, Betty sprang the news she had been
bursting to tell ever since they started.

"Girls," she cried, and quickly they turned to her, sensing something
unusual in her tone, "I have a surprise for you."

"Yes?" they cried eagerly.

"It's about our Sergeant William Mullins Sanderson," she announced, her
eyes sparkling.

"Yes?" they cried again, and Mollie added impatiently:

"Oh, Betty, don't keep us waiting. What about him?"

"Only," said Betty, speaking very slowly and distinctly, "that he's got
the thing he wanted most in the world--besides his mother. This morning he
received his overseas orders."

"Oh, Betty!" cried Mollie, her eyes big and round. "Isn't he simply wild
about i