Patsy Carroll Under Southern Skies
Chase Josephine
Josephine Chase
Patsy Carroll Under Southern Skies
CHAPTER I
TIME TO GO WAYFARING AGAIN
“Oh, dear!” loudly sighed Patsy Carroll.
The regretful exclamation was accompanied by the energetic banging of Patsy’s French grammar upon the table.
“Stay there, tiresome old thing!” she emphasized. “I’ve had enough of you for one evening.”
“What’s the matter, Patsy?”
Beatrice Forbes raised mildly inquiring eyes from the theme she was industriously engaged in writing.
“Lots of things. I hate French verbs. The crazy old irregular ones most of all. They start out one thing and by the time you get to the future tense they’re something entirely different.”
“Is that all?” smiled Beatrice. “You ought to be used to them by this time.”
“That’s only one of my troubles,” frowned Patsy. “There are others a great deal worse. One of them is this Easter vacation business. I thought we’d surely have three weeks. It’s always been so at Yardley until this year. Two weeks is no vacation worth mentioning.”
“Well, that’s plenty of time to go home in and stay at home and see the folks for a while, isn’t it?” asked Beatrice.
“But we didn’t intend going home,” protested Patsy.
“Didn’t intend going home?” repeated Beatrice wonderingly. “What are you talking about, Patsy Carroll? I certainly expect to go home for Easter.”
“You only think you do,” Patsy assured, her troubled face relaxing into a mischievous grin. “Maybe you will, though. I don’t know. It depends upon what kind of scheme my gigantic brain can think up.
“It’s like this, Bee,” she continued, noting her friend’s expression of mystification. “Father and I made a peach of a plan. Excuse my slang, but �peach of a plan’ just expresses it. Well, when I was at home over Christmas, Father promised me that the Wayfarers should join him and Aunt Martha at Palm Beach for the Easter vacation. He bought some land down in Florida last fall. Orange groves and all that, you know. This land isn’t so very far from Palm Beach. He was going down there right after Christmas, but a lot of business prevented him from going. He’s down there now, though, and – ”
“You’ve been keeping all this a dead secret from your little chums,” finished Beatrice with pretended reproach.
“Of course I have,” calmly asserted Patsy. “That was to be part of the fun. I meant to spring a fine surprise on you girls. Your mother knows all about it. So does Mrs. Perry. I went around and asked them if you and Mab and Nellie could go while I was at home during the Christmas holidays. Aunt Martha liked my plan, too. Now we’ll have to give it up and go somewhere nearer home. We’d hardly get settled at Palm Beach when we’d have to come right home again. One more week’s vacation would make a lot of difference. And we can’t have it! It’s simply too mean for anything!”
“It would be wonderful to go to Palm Beach,” mused Beatrice. “It would be to me, anyway. You know I’ve never traveled as you have, Patsy. Going to the Adirondacks last summer was my first real trip away from home. Going to Florida would seem like going to fairy land.”
Readers of “Patsy Carroll at Wilderness Lodge,” are already well acquainted, not only with Patsy Carroll and Beatrice Forbes, but also with their chums, Mabel and Eleanor Perry. In this story was narrated the adventures of the four young girls, who, chaperoned by Patsy’s stately aunt, Miss Martha Carroll, spent a summer together in the Adirondacks.
Wilderness Lodge, the luxurious “camp” leased by Mr. Carroll for the summer, had formerly belonged to an eccentric old man, Ebeneezer Wellington. Having died intestate the previous spring, his property and money had passed into the hands of Rupert Grandin, his worthless nephew, leaving his foster-daughter, Cecil Vane, penniless.
Hardly were the Wayfarers, as the four girls had named themselves, est