nd as Miss Leicester looked up at him she was touched
at the change in his face. How boyish and almost gay he was again! She
caught his eye, and gave him a kind reassuring little nod, as if nobody
could be more pleased to have him happy than herself.

The Starlight was now aground in the bright green river grass and the
flats were bare for a long distance beyond, so that there was no more
boating for the present. There were plenty of comfortable hollows to
rest in farther back on the soft carpet under the pines, and so the
dining-room nearer the shore was abandoned and the provisions cached, as
Mr. Leicester called it, under an oak-tree. Certain things had been
forgotten, but just round the point the steeples of Riverport were in
full view; and when everybody had rested enough and the tide was
creeping in, Mr. Leicester first sent Harry out in the small boat and
his long-legged fishing-boots to get two buckets of river mud, and after
he had seated himself beside them with his magnifying-glasses and a
paraphernalia of tools familiar to Betty, Harry was given orders to take
Seth Pond and the two girls and go down to Riverport shopping, as soon
as the Starlight floated again.

Harry was hovering over the scientific enterprise and looked sorry for a
minute, but it seemed to the girls as if the tide had stopped rising. At
last they got on board by going down the shore a little way to be taken
off the sooner from some rock. Aunt Barbara announced that she meant to
go too; indeed, she was not tired; what had there been to tire her? So
off they all went, and left Mr. Leicester to his investigations. It took
some time to go to Riverport, for the wind was light and the tide
against them. Everybody, and Betty in particular, thought it great fun
to make fast to the wharf and go ashore up into the town shopping. Aunt
Barbara gayly stepped off first, to see an old friend who lived a little
way above the business part of the town, and, asked to be called for, as
they went back, at the friend's river gate. Harry knew it?--the high
house with the lookout on top and the gate at the garden-foot. Betty
went first to find her early friend, the woman who kept the bake-house,
and was recognized at once and provided with fresh buns and crisp
molasses cookies which had hardly cooled. Then Betty and Becky walked
about the narrow streets for an hour, enjoying themselves highly and
collecting ship's stores at two or three fruit shops; also laying