"Oh!" she shrieked. "You must never leave me like this again, Roger. I worried so about you that my stomach ached all the time you were gone."
Charley laughed with the rest, but quickly sobered. "I'm so glad you were able to take care of poor Uncle Otto," she said. "I shall miss him so. None of you knew him as I did." There was a pause, then Charley went on, "Just think of Ernest's sister coming! I remember her vaguely. She's like you, isn't she, Ernest?"
"Not a bit," said Roger. "She's full of pep and very good looking."
"Well, what do you know about that?" asked Ernest, looking at Roger wonderingly.
"She's going to stay with us, isn't she? Please say yes," cried Charley.
"Oh, no, don't have her here. She wouldn't like to be here all the time," begged Felicia. Then she blushed and retreated behind Roger's chair. She refused half tearfully to explain her statement when Dick urged her, at first jokingly, then in a commanding manner.
"Tell me, Felicia, don't you like it here?" drawing her to his side.
"Oh, let her alone, Dicky," begged Charley. "Why insist on a child's reason for anything?"
"But I want to know! Tell me, Felicia, don't you like it here?"
"Yes," said Felicia, with trembling lips, "I like it here, 'cept when you get sick and are so awful cross with me and Charley and make Charley cry. I wouldn't want Elsa to see you that way."
Dick turned purple. "Oh, well," cut in Roger, quickly, "Elsa'll have three men's crossness to put up with down at our camp, Felicia. Just think of that! And if it should happen that we'd all get cross at once, probably we'd blow the roof of the engine house off again."
"That's why we want Elsa to stay with us," said Ernest. "You see when men are cross, the only thing that cures them is having a nice girl around to make them ashamed of themselves."
"Sometimes already, if it gets too much vhen I make myself mad," added Gustav, "maybe ve get a squaw to come by our camp to vip us bad boys for Fräulein Elsa, eh?"
"If all the men in the world get cross, like you, Dicky," asked Felicia, wonderingly, "why do ladies marry them?"
"They don't, chicken! No one's married me."
"Maybe Elsa will. Unless Gustav gets her," suggested Felicia.
"Maybe Roger, he gets her, eh?" asked Gustav.
"Oh, no!" in sudden alarm, crossing over to Roger's knee to look up into his face with a depth of love in her brown eyes that tightened his throat as he lifted her into his lap. "Roger's going to marry me. Only Roger, if ever you're as cross to me as you were to Gustav, I shall just walk out of the house and never, never come back."