But it would be several days before Mr. Nelson could return, and those days were anxious ones indeed for the outdoor girls. The morning after the scare in the cellar inquiries were made, but no trace of the mysterious men was found.
"I can"t stand this much longer!" declared Betty, one night. "I almost wish we"d never found the diamonds."
"You"re nervous," said Mollie. "We"ve been too much in the house.
To-morrow we shall try one of our old stunts--a picnic!"
"Good!" cried Grace. "That will be fun!"
CHAPTER XIX
THE PICNIC
"Did you bring plenty of olives?"
"And I do hope we didn"t forget the cheese crackers!"
"Oh, everything is here--more than we"ll eat, I think, by the weight of the baskets."
"Where did I put--oh, here they are!"
This last, with a sigh of relief, as she found her package of candy, came from Grace. Mollie, Amy and Betty had, in turn, been heard from in the aforequoted remarks.
"It"s a glorious day; isn"t it?" questioned Grace as she walked on beside Amy.
"Yes, but not so nice that you need forget you"re carrying only a box of chocolates," remarked Betty, pointedly. "Take one of these baskets."
"Oh, excuse me," apologized Grace, and she turned quickly, wincing a bit as she did so.
"Those same ridiculous shoes!" cried Mollie.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Grace Ford."
"Why? They"re the most comfortable ones I have, to go tramping about in, and they"re so stained from the salt water that they can"t be damaged any more. Just right for the picnic, I think."
"Yes, but you walk worse than a Chinese woman before the binding of feet was forbidden. Don"t let her carry anything spillable, Betty, or we won"t have all the lunch we count on," Mollie urged.
"Oh, is that so!" exclaimed Grace, with as near an approach to "snippiness" as she ever permitted herself.
"Oh, I"ll carry the basket," said gentle Amy, always anxious to avoid a quarrel.
"You"ll do nothing of the sort!" insisted Betty, who had, like the Little Captain she was, arranged the commissary department on lines she intended to see carried out.
"Oh, well, if we"re going, let"s go!" exclaimed Mollie. "We"re wasting the best part of the day getting ready."
It was the day after Mollie had proposed that the outdoor girls go on a little picnic, and her plan had been enthusiastically adopted. As she had said, the affair of the diamonds was getting on the nerves of them all. They had stuck too close to the house, and there was a "jumpiness"
and fault-finding spirit seldom manifested by the four chums.
They were to take their lunch, and spend the day on the beach, or in the scrubby woods, not far away, taking to a boat if they felt so inclined.
The boys had offered to take them out for a cruise in the _Pocohontas_, but the girls felt that they would rather be by themselves on this occasion.
Accordingly lunch baskets had been packed and now this glorious summer morning they were about to start. The boys, their kind offer refused, had gone off on a fishing jaunt--that is, all but Will, and he had not returned from Boston. Grace had a hasty note from him in which he stated that work connected with his new duties would keep him busy for a week or so, after which he hoped to join his friends at Edgemere.
"No news of a diamond robbery around Boston," he wrote, in a letter.
"I"ve written to a fellow in New York about it, though. Sometimes the police keep those things out of the papers for reasons of their own.
Maybe they think the robbers won"t know the diamonds have been taken, if nothing is printed about it, at least that"s the way it looks."
At any rate Will reported no news, and Mr. Nelson had pretty much the same story to tell. His wife had written to him about the men in the cellar, and he had advised getting some fisherman of the neighborhood to stay on guard every night, until he could come down to Ocean View again.
"We might get Old Tin-Back," suggested Betty.
"It would only make me nervous," her mother said. "I don"t believe the men will bother us again."
"Well, they won"t find the diamonds down cellar if they do pay us another visit," Betty had said. She had, after some thought, hidden the precious stones in her own room, wrapping the box in some sheets of asbestos, which Allen had left over after putting some on the m.u.f.fler of the motor boat.
"The asbestos will protect the diamonds in case of fire," Betty said, "and I"ll protect them in case of thieves. Anyhow, no one, not even the servants, know where they are, and it would take a good while to find them in my room."
For she had discovered an ingenious little hiding place for the mysterious black box.
The boys, after the scare of the men in the cellar, had offered to take the diamonds up to Boston, or some other city near Ocean View, and put them in the vault of some bank.
"But you might be robbed on the train, going up," objected Betty. "We"ll keep them here until the secret is discovered. That will be the best thing to do."
"And that may never be," Allen had said, for he had long since given up the cipher. Nor had experts, to whom he had submitted it, been able to furnish a clue to its solution.
So, while the boys had gone out fishing in the motor boat, the girls prepared for their picnic, leaving the diamonds at home.
Percy Falconer had declined the boys" invitation to go fishing, and when Betty heard him say that he feared to go out on the water she had looked at her chums with hopeless despair on her face.
"What if he wants to come on the picnic with us?" she whispered to Grace.
"We--we"ll run away from him!" had been the ultimatum. But Percy did not pluck up enough courage to trust himself, the only youth, with four girls.
"I"ll go for a run in my car, and may pick you up and bring you back later," he said, with a glance at his wrist watch. He was still a guest at Edgemere.
"Well, let"s start!" called Betty, and the four girls set off down the beach.
"Why are you going that way?" asked Grace, as Mollie and Betty, who had taken the lead, started along a certain path amid the sand dunes.
"Just for fun," answered Betty. "I have a fancy for looking again at the place where we found the diamonds."
"We can"t seem to get rid of them, day or night--sleeping or waking,"
spoke Amy. "Isn"t it dreadful how they follow one?"
"Well, I, for one, don"t want to get rid of them," Mollie said, with a laugh. "They are far too pretty and valuable to lose sight of. Though of course I want whoever owns them to get his property back."