n return. Her uncle looked worried and nervous. Indeed, he
started like a hunted wild creature, when a boy spoke suddenly to him.
It was Roger, an office boy whom Anne had seen on the holiday occasions
when she had met her uncle down-town. Roger held out a yellow envelope.
Her uncle snatched it, and--just then there came between him and Anne a
group of hurrying passengers--a stout man in a light gray coat and a
pink shirt, a stout woman in a dark silk travelling coat, and two stout,
short-skirted girls with good-natured faces, round as full moons. The
younger girl was dragging a doll carriage carelessly with one hand. The
doll had fallen forward so that her frizzled yellow head bounced up and
down on her fluffy blue skirts.

"Oh! Poor dollie!" exclaimed Anne to herself. "I do wish uncle--" she
caught a fleeting glimpse of him beside the workman with the canvas
bag--"if just he hadn't hurried so. How could I forget Rosy Posy? I wish
that fat girl would let me hold her baby doll. She's just dragging it
along."

Presently the Stout family, as Anne called it to herself, came
sauntering along the deck near her. She started forward, wishing to beg
leave to set the fallen doll to rights, and then stopped short, too shy
to speak to the strange girl.

A lean, sour-faced man in black bumped against her. "What an awkward
child!" he said crossly.

Anne reddened and retreated to the railing. Feeling all at once very
small and lonely, she searched the dock for her uncle but he was nowhere
to be seen.

Then a bell rang. People hurried up the gang-plank. Last of all was a
workman in blue overalls, with a soft hat jammed over his eyes. Orders
were shouted. The gang-plank was drawn in. Then the _Caronia_ wakened
up, churned the brown water into foam, crept from the dock, picked her
way among the river vessels, and sped on her ocean voyage.

CHAPTER II

It was eight o'clock and a crisp, clear morning. A stewardess was
offering tea and toast to Mrs. Patterson, the frail little lady whom
Anne had observed in a wheel-chair the afternoon before. Seen closely,
her face had a pathetic prettiness. With the delicate color in her soft
cheeks, she looked like a fading tea rose. Yet one knew at a glance that
she and bird-like Miss Sarah Drayton were sisters. There was the same
oval face--this hollowed and that plump; the same soft brown hair--this
wavy and that sleek; the same wide-open hazel eyes--these soft and
sombre, those brigh