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38 them all night in hair-raising nightmares), and once the haven of the hotel was reached, showing herself game, after luncheon, for the toboggan slide, with the horrible crash at the foot that sent each time a familiar pain zigzagging up through her troublesome backbone.

She was aching and sore the next morning. She hadn't slept very much. There hadn't been enough covers on the bed; the thermometer had taken a sudden drop; it was fearfully cold. She had prayed for storm—rain, snow, hail—anything to give her twenty-four hours' respite from another day's such effort. But there wasn't a cloud in the pale winter-blue sky which she glimpsed through the bit of glass free from frost on her bedroom window. There was nothing, as far as she could see, to interrupt the plan, discussed the night before, of eating a picnic dinner half-way up a mountain five miles away, to the foot of which a pair of horses would carry the Bartlett party, both men and girls this time, and meet them on the other side in the afternoon, thence to another hotel for the night, and a tramp back to headquarters the second day.

Ollie Bartlett had suggested to Edna that she need not feel obliged to join them.

"You know everybody does just as he pleases