xt the thunder roared about what it might do, and
then our friends hurried away from the scene. The run brought them
some way on the direct road to the Berkshires, and in one of those
spots where it would seem the ark must have tipped, and dropped a human
being or two, the young people found a small country community.

The special feature of this community was not a church, nor yet a
meeting house, but a well-equipped hotel, with all the requisites and
perquisites of a first-class hostelry.

"No more traveling to-day," remarked Cora, as, after a wait of two
hours, she ventured to observe the future possible weather. "It looks
as if it would rain all there was above, and then start in to scoop up
some from the ocean. Did you ever see such clouds?"

Ed said he had not. Walter said he did not want to, while the girls
didn't just know. They wanted to be off, and hoped Cora's observations
were not well-founded.

Miss Robbins found in the hotel a sick baby to take up her time, and
she inveigled Bess into helping her, while the wornout and worried
mother took some rest. The little one, a darling girl of four years,
had taken cold, and had the most troublesome of troubles--an
earache--so that she cried constantly, until Miss Robbins eased the
pain.

When the boys realized what a really good doctor the girls' chaperon
was, they all wanted to get sick in bed, Jack claiming the first
"whack."

But Walter had some claim on medical attendance, for when the storm was
seen to be coming up he had eaten more stuff from the lunch basket than
just one Walter could comfortably store away, and the headache that
followed was not mere pretense.

So the rainy afternoon at Restover Hotel was not idle in incident. It
was almost tea time when Cora had a chance to speak with her brother
privately. She beckoned him to a corner of the porch where the rain
could not find them; neither could any of their friends.

"Jack," she began, "do you know that the people in the gypsy wagon
really did try to stop us? All that prattle of Bess and Belle was not
nonsense. Only for Miss Robbins I should have stopped."

"Well, what's the answer?" asked her brother.

"That's just what I would like to find out," replied the sister. "It
seems to me they would hardly have stopped a couple of girls to ask
road directions or anything like that, when so many wagons, easier to
halt than automobiles, had also passed by them."

"Maybe they wanted some