BARBARA HALE: A DOCTOR’S DAUGHTER
[Illustration: “OH,” GASPED BABS, “I DIDN’T KNOW——”]
BARBARA HALE:
A DOCTOR’S DAUGHTER
By
LILIAN GARIS
Author of
“BARBARA HALE AND COZETTE,” “CONNIE LORING’S
AMBITION,” “JOAN: JUST GIRL,” “GLORIA: A
GIRL AND HER DAD,” “GLORIA AT
BOARDING SCHOOL,” ETC.
ILLUSTRATED BY
J. M. FOSTER
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
Made in the United States of America
Books by Lilian Garis
Joan: Just Girl
Joan’s Garden of Adventure
Gloria: A Girl and Her Dad
Gloria at Boarding School
Connie Loring’s Ambition
Connie Loring’s Dilemma
Barbara Hale: A Doctor’s Daughter
Barbara Hale and Cozette
Copyright, 1926, by
GROSSET & DUNLAP
CONTENTS
I Sea Sands and Somersaults
II When the Day Arrived
III Her Father’s Daughter
IV On Her Way
V Billows the Beautiful
VI The Accident
VII Nicky and Vicky
VIII Clothes
IX Suspicions
X How Girls Choose Chums
XI The Midnight Ride
XII Dumped but Not Discouraged
XIII Crazy Quilts Galore
XIV A Honeysuckle Secret
XV The Santa Maria
XVI When a Girl Thinks Hard
XVII The Loss
XVIII Suspicions
XIX News from Nicky
XX Fighting It Out
XXI Brighter but Not Quite Clear
XXII Washington Answers
XXIII Prolonging the Agony
XXIV Scouts in the Wood
XXV A Revelation
XXVI Tumbling In
BARBARA HALE: A DOCTOR’S DAUGHTER
CHAPTER I
SEA SANDS AND SOMERSAULTS
They dug their heels deeper into the white sand. As they were bare
heels there seemed to be nothing else to do with them.
“I think it’s simply a wonderful idea,” Louise St. Clair reiterated,
“only, I can’t just see how you are going to feed us all for three
whole days, Cara.”
“Feed you! Dear child, that’s the easiest part of it. Lottie adores
feeding the hungry. But what bothers me is what I can do to keep you
all happy.” Cara Burke, who had never been called Caroline, took her
heels out of the sand and stuck them up in the sunshine. She was so
strictly modern and so much up to date that her own personal schedule
must have been eons ahead of the time marked on the pretty calendars
sent around by M. Helmer, the butcher.
“A house party is bound to make us all so happy we’ll never want to go
home, Cara,” declared Esther Deane, she with a new boyish bob hair-cut
that she couldn’t keep her hands off. “I’d like to fetch my trunk, if
we only lived a few blocks farther away.”
“Fetch it; there’re bushels of room out in the garage,” responded Cara
mischievously. “But you know, children, my list isn’t filled yet. I
have just got to have Barbara Hale.”
“Barbara Hale!” Both girls exclaimed in perfect unison.
“Yes.” Cara squatted on her bare feet now and showed signs of
conflict. “I want her. I like her. She’s so different, she’s sure to
be good fun.”
“Good fun!” Esther almost sneered. “About as funny as a Latin exam,
I’d guess. She looks different, and she is different. But at a house
party! Cara, you’re crazy.”
“So they say,” agreed Cara dryly. “But I’m going to ask her, just the
same.”
“She’ll never leave that dad of hers,” declared Louise. “You know he’s
some kind of a queer doctor and they say she’s going to be a nurse.”
“He’s a bacteriologist,” Esther informed her friends, with that very
definite tone always peculiarly Esther’s when she knew anything so
worth while as that.
“Well,” drawled Cara, “Dudley says she’s a peach, and while he’s not
to come to the party he might just look in and——”
“And poor us! We may have to rival a peach,” moaned Louise. “I do wish
you wouldn’t, Cara,” she pleaded again. “Honestly, I am afraid of
anything so high and mighty as Barbara Hale.”
“Why should she be so high and mighty?” challenged Cara. “She’s no
older than we are.”
“She’s past fifteen, I should think,” guessed Esther.
“I suppose she is, for she was in first year high last summer when we
came back to Sea Cosset; I remember that,” agreed Cara quite amicably.
Cara wasn’t merely pretty, she was lively always, and her brown eyes
managed her entire face so capably one never noticed the little
irregularity of her other features. Every one said Cara Burke was “all
eyes” and her eyes were lovely.
“It’s queer how every one thinks Barbara is so wonderful,” Esther was
determined to find fault. “She just acts like an old lady, it seems to
me.”
“Esther Phester! How dare you!” mocked Cara. “Now, you’re being
jealous. You see, it’s like this. There are lots of wise old ladies
but a wise young lady is different.”
“You talk rather wise yourself and you’re not so old,” retorted
Louise.
“I am old. I love to be. Children are a pest, so please don’t act so
childish, girls,” Cara in turn retorted. “You’re both perfectly lovely
when you talk sensibly, so let’s decide how we are going to get the
wily Barbara to our house party. Any suggestions?”
Persons just sauntering along for a rather late swim attracted their
attention, and for the time being Barbara Hale was apparently
forgotten. New and odd bathing suits were ever interesting to the
girls, and those at the moment being displayed were certainly novel if
not actually new.
“How can red-headed girls wear that howling yellow?” commented Louise.
“She looks like a gasoline sign.” Her own hair favored the red tints,
what there was of it.
“That tango is worse,” declared Esther. “They must be strangers.”
“Just wandered down from the other beach, I guess,” Cara said
indifferently. She was never as much interested in strangers as were
her two friends.
Settling down again to finish their sunning, for they had had their
swim some time earlier, the subject of Barbara Hale was once more
introduced.
“I don’t see that you girls are helping me out very much with my guest
list,” Cara reminded them. “You know I am bound to have Barbara. Now,
I’ll offer a prize for the best suggestion. How shall I invite her?”
“Why not ‘hail’ her down here?” Louise suggested.
“Now, Louie; that’s being too smart; to pun on Barbara’s name,”
answered Cara. “The fact is, or isn’t it? Does she come down here,
ever?”
“It isn’t, she doesn’t. You don’t catch that smart girl wasting her
time on the beach.” As Esther said this she seemed to enjoy the saying
of it.
“I’d like to know, Essie,” drawled Cara, using the little name Esther
detested, “what have _you_ against Barbara Hale?”
“I!” How much she made of the smallest word! As if the idea were
preposterous.
“Yes, you. Every time I mention Barbara you just seethe up.” Cara
tossed up a shower of sand that slipped through her fingers in little
streams—what was left of the shower did that. If, as she said, Esther
did dislike Barbara, surely she, Cara, must have liked her, decidedly.
Esther didn’t try to answer the charge. They were, all three of them,
just at that stage of young girlhood that might be called the mimic
stage. They said smart things, or tried to say them, because older
girls acted that way. True, the older girls never deigned to associate
with Cara, and her “set.” Just “kids” they were still being
inelegantly styled. But girls in second year high do feel rather
important, and at this particular new summer season the three girls on
the beach at Sea Cosset were not one whit less important—in their own
way—than Elinor Towle, Katherine Barrett and Melinde Trainor, all over
twenty, and now sitting on the same cozy little beach nearer the
water. Merely degrees of difference separated them, but there seemed
nothing essentially different between the two groups.
And to make the comparison still closer, here was Cara planning to
give a house party.
“I don’t care what any one says,” Louise spoke up rather like a small
girl again, “it’s a perfectly darling idea. Even if we all do live
around here; what difference would a train ride make in a house
party?”
“None; not a speck,” confirmed Esther, both the girls bracing Cara up
in her resolve to give the party and worrying secretly lest she back
out.
“Except,” chimed in Cara, “that when they come a distance they have to
stay. If you girls get bored to death you could even sneak home in
your nighties,” she wound up, turning a very good hand-spring to prove
why she was such a fine basketball player.
“No danger of _us_ sneaking home, Cara,” declared Louise. “I’m just
crazy about the idea. And I know there are a lot of girls jealous
because you didn’t ask them,” she flattered the prospective hostess.
“Really!” Cara reversed the hand-spring and threw up a veritable
desert sandstorm with the turn. “The only reason I have asked just
five,” she panted, settling again, “is because mother would only let
me have three rooms.”
“Just imagine having _three_ rooms for company!” gasped Esther. “I’m
lucky to get an extra cot in my own room and the attic privilege while
we’re down here. But _you_ can invite a whole tribe to stay days with
you.”
“Now girls!” spoke Cara, sighing a little as if in despair at their
attitude, “don’t get the idea that a big house and a flock of servants
make a lot of fun. They don’t. We had better times when we camped in a
lovely wide-open bungalow out on the bluff, where you didn’t dare
leave the front door open without danger of blowing out at the back
door. Oh me, oh my!” she sighed. “Them was the days! When I ate
molasses cookies without fear of fatness. But we are not getting at
the important point of asking Barbara. Haven’t you anything else to
propose? It will be time to dress before we decide a single thing.”
“Why not call on her? She’s not anything to be afraid of, is she?”
This was Esther, of course.
“No.” Cara paused, thoughtfully. “But she is, I know, a busy girl, and
one doesn’t want to ‘bust’ in on a high-brow just as she’s in the act
of discovering some scientific—oh, whatever it is they discover, you
know,” she floundered. “Besides, it would look so important if I
called. As if my party was really going to be a party instead of a
row. I’m sure it will end in a row, you know,” Cara was prettiest when
she laughed.
“Cara Burke! You just want to make believe it isn’t going to be
wonderful when you know very well it is,” pouted Louise. “But if you
want Barbara Hale so badly, I’ll manage somehow to see her, and I’ll
ask her if you want me to.”
“Want you to! I’d _love_ you to. I just want Barbara, well, for more
than one reason, but _one_ is because Dud declares she wouldn’t bother
with such silly little things as he claims we are. I want to show
him.”
“Oh, that’s it.” Esther’s lip curled and she was now acting very grown
up indeed.
“Does Dud know Barbara?” Louise wanted to know.
“That’s just it. She’s sort of, what he calls, elusive. They just know
her enough to be curious about her.”
“I don’t think she’s so wonderfully pretty,” commented Esther again.
“And I’m certain sure she’s not rich!”
“Esther Phester!” cried out Cara in mock despair. “There you go. Rich!
That isn’t what counts at all, not with boys like Dud, anyway. _They_
like girls who keep them guessing.”
“Oh, Barbara Hale can do that well enough,” scoffed Esther. “Isn’t she
keeping us guessing?”
“Just because she keeps to herself,” retorted Cara. “Now, that’s just
why I’m so crazy to know her. There must be a reason for her, oh, you
know,” again stumbled Cara, who wanted to say there must have been a
reason for Barbara’s aloofness, or was it reticence?
“Since you are so keen about it Cara, I’ll do my best,” offered
Louise. “You know, her father is a sort of doctor and has some of the
awfully rich folks on his list.”
“Rich!” moaned Cara. She seemed to loathe the word. They were starting
off towards the boardwalk along which a slim line of girls and boys
were already winding their way towards the road. It was almost lunch
time.
Just as the girls came to within a few feet of the roadway a small car
drew up and from it sprang two persons.
“Look!” gasped Louise. “There she is now!”
“Is that—Barbara!” exclaimed Cara in an undertone, for the two in
bathing suits—a young girl and a young man—were racing along through
the sands quite close to them.
“Yes,” answered Esther and Louise in one voice.
“Isn’t she stunning in a bathing suit?” continued the entranced Cara.
“She must be dandy at athletics.” The two figures under scrutiny were
now far enough away to be out of possible reach of the girls’ voices.
Barbara Hale was wearing the regulation blue bathing suit with white
stripes around the long Jersey and a loose sash flew along after her
as she ran towards the ocean. She was trying to adjust her rubber cap
as she went, and was just now crowding into it a closely bobbed head,
chestnut in color, that beautiful brown that glows and glistens and
lights up so wonderfully in the sunshine. Barbara was as slender and
straight as an Indian. Her limbs were innocent of stockings or socks,
for girls under sixteen were not now trying to be prim at Sea Cosset,
that is, girls like Barbara.
“But who can the good-looking boy be?” Louise wondered. “Isn’t he
just—just——”
“Not lovely,” warned Cara. “Please don’t call him anything so silly as
that. He’s fine looking, just great. Whew! Look at those two strike
out!”
Dots on the waves were all that could now be seen of the two who were
ducking in and out of the crest, but the girls still watched as if
fascinated.
“Better ask him to the party, Cara,” suggested Esther. “I’ll bet all
the girls would want to stay if he were around.”
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” proposed the wily Cara. “I’ll tell
Dudley I’ll have Barbara to the party if he manages to fetch along the
good-looking boy. I’ve just decided to give a dance. Why shouldn’t we
have a dance?” she asked simply, with one of those sudden strokes of
social genius she was especially noted for.
“A dance!” echoed Louise, in ecstasy. She did clasp her hands but
caught herself just in time to save that foolish expression Cara was
sure to call saintly. Louise was very apt to clasp her hands, throw
one of those heavenly looks out of her gray eyes, and altogether
affect quite a pose when anything suddenly pleased her.
“Yes, a dance,” Cara repeated. “We are grown up enough for that,
although we couldn’t, of course, ask the boys to the house party. They
_could_ come in to the dance.”
“Just look at Barbara Hale now,” suggested Esther. The figures were
shaking themselves out of the waves, and as the girls watched they saw
Barbara put her two hands on a big post that supported the ropes, and
vault over as easily as did her companion following her. “Don’t you
suppose he’s her cousin?” Esther asked, innocently.
“Not necessarily,” replied Cara. “But if we don’t make a break for
lunch——” They made the break.