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have been keeping an eye on Bobby. She hurried outside to Brian.
    He was looking up and down the driveway for Bobby. “Here.” She tossed Strawberry’s currycomb to him. “I’ll try the house. He may have decided to mooch some cookies at the kitchen.”
    Trixie hurried up toward the Manor House, calling impatiently first in one direction and then the other, “Bobby! Where are you?”
    She was about halfway to the Manor House when she saw the little boy come around the comer from the rear, with Miss Trask on one side and Celia on his other. He was carrying a skate in one hand while he munched on a fistful of cookies from his other hand.
    He waved gaily. “Hi, Trixie! We founded my skate!” he called and came running.
    The gray-haired housekeeper and Celia halted to watch him greet Trixie, and then they turned and went back to the house with a farewell wave.
    “Tom fixed it Celia says it was in the kitchen now can we go skating?” Bobby ran the words all together.
    “I guess so, if it doesn’t snow too hard,” Trixie told him, holding firmly to his wrist as they went back to the barn. “Let’s see what Brian says.”
    The work was finished, and they quickly decided that half an hour on the ice would do them all a lot of good. They set out, stopping only a few minutes at the clubhouse to get their skates.
    It was quite a distance into the woods before they would come to the lake. They went single file through the evergreen forest to the sloping hillside that sheltered one end of the lake from most of the wind. There was a good spot among the rocks where they always built a campfire, and the boys went to work at once to get one started.
    The ice was smooth and clean. Honey put her skates on at once and checked to see that there were no broken twigs embedded in the ice in the little cove where she planned to take Bobby for his skating lesson.
    Trixie and Mart paced off a length of shoreline along which Mart intended to work up his speed. They marked it with a strip of red cloth at each end, and Mart began practicing, while Brian timed him with the watch.
    Trixie was feeding the campfire with some wood she had gathered when Honey started to the cove, leading Bobby by the hand.
    “You can come n’ watch, Trixie,” Bobby called to his sister as he skated more or less steadily at Honey’s side.
    “All right. You practice awhile, and I’ll be with you soon,” she called, waving them on.
    She was still feeding the fire carefully a few minutes later when she heard the sound of a car’s motor. It was coming from the private road over on the other side of the hill.
    It was a steep, narrow road and very bumpy. It wasn’t meant for anything but a car with four-wheel drive, and from the sound of this car, the driver was having a time getting uphill with this one. The road led only to the game preserve and Mr. Maypenny’s cabin in the center of it.
    She knew that Mr. Maypenny didn’t have a car. In fact, he positively loathed the “critters.” When he didn’t walk on his rounds of the traps and snares for the pesty little cottontails, he rode Brownie, his old mare.
    Now the chugging and puffing sounded as if it were just on the other side of the hill. Trixie couldn’t resist climbing up to the top of the hill among the tall spruces and trying to see who was driving that car. If it turned out to be Mr. Maypenny himself, f she would have fun teasing him about driving, after f all the things he had said about cars.
    She started to climb, but she was in too much of a hurry. She carelessly stepped on a loose rock on the side of the hill and stumbled, landing on one knee. It was a hard fall and it hurt; by the time she had scrambled to her feet and limped the rest of the way up to the top of the hill, the car had passed. The only glimpse she had of it was of the rear end turning a comer in the road and going out of sight.
    She rubbed her painfully skinned knee and went down the hill again, very much annoyed with