could no longer bear to inflict pain. He lifted his head and looked up a little slope of snow. Near the top, wonderfully rosy and smiling, sat his culprit sisters. He had forgotten why he had come. He smiled in his sudden embarrassment. "Don't shoot, colonel," called Gay, "and we'll come down." "Promise, then," he said, "that you'll never be naughty again." "We promise," they said. And they trudged back to camp, with jokes and laughter and three very sharp appetites. [Pg 44] [Pg 44] VI Beyond seeing to it that the alluring picture of his sisters should not appear in any future issues of the magazines, Arthur did not refer to the matter again. The girls, more particularly Lee and Gay, always attributed the instant success of The Camp to the picture; but it is sanely possible that an inn run upon such very extravagant principles was bound to be a success anyway. America is full of people who will pay anything for the comforts of home with the cares and exasperations left out. A majority of the early applications received at The Camp office, and politely rejected by Maud, were from old friends of the family, who were eagerly willing to give its fallen finances a boost. But the girls were determined that their scheme should stand upon its own meritorious feet or not at all. When Samuel Langham learned that the ice was going out of New Moon Lake, he wrote that he would arrive at Carrytown at such and such[Pg 45] an hour, and begged that a boat of some sort might be there to meet him. His guests, he explained, would follow in a few days. [Pg 45] "Dear me," said Maud, "it will be very trying to have him alone—just like a real guest. If he'd only bring his friends with him, why, they could entertain him. As it is, we'll have to. Because, even if we are innkeepers now, we belong to the same station in life that he does, and he knows it and we know it. I don't see how we can ever have the face to send in a bill afterward." "I don't either," said Mary, "but we must." "I've never
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