Page:Stella Dallas, a novel (IA stelladallasnove00prou).pdf/231

Rh played tennis with three girls of "the crowd"; that very afternoon played golf with three others; that very evening met the boys and danced until the music stopped, running upstairs between numbers to see if her mother was comfortable, and to let her share what she knew would make her happier than anything else in the world.

"Well, I guess we've struck the right place at last, Lollie," Stella exclaimed from her pillow, with a glint of triumph in her eyes. "Don't think of me. Don't come up again, dearie. I'm all right. I'm bound to be. I just knew we'd happen on to gold some day."

It had all been pure luck. Stella had chosen this particular hotel from a circular, on the strength of the fact of its high rates. The start had been anything but propitious. Either she or Laurel had been ill from the first moment of their arrival. Laurel was confined to the bedroom the first twenty-four hours, and Stella had been obliged to wander about the unexplored regions downstairs companionless. Then the moment the fever left Laurel, didn't it go and settle itself upon Stella—settle and stay, too! At the end of two weeks Stella was only just beginning to sit up in a chair by her bed.

lunch under the tall pines on Stag Island, the boys went off to explore the coast; and the girls (after the tea-baskets were repacked and the pine-needle bank made as neat and clean as the inside of a pine chest) grouped themselves in colorful bunches on the soft brown background, and producing gay