ay a few days at the
Grange, and then he looked at the girl somewhat diffidently.

"She suggests going in a fortnight," he said.

Agatha smiled at him. "Then," she said, "I must not keep her waiting."

She rose, and they went back together to join their hostess.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE TRAVELLING COMPANION.

A grey haze, thickened by the smoke of the city, drove out across the
water when the _Scarrowmania_ lay in the Mersey, with her cable hove
short, and the last of the flood tide gurgling against her bows. A
trumpeting blast of steam swept high aloft from beside her squat
funnel, and the splash of the slowly turning paddles of the couple of
steam tugs that lay alongside mingled with the din it made. A gangway
from one of them led to the _Scarrowmania's_ forward deck, and a stream
of frowsy humanity that had just been released from overpacked emigrant
boarding-houses poured up it. There were apparently representatives of
all peoples and languages among that unkempt horde--Britons,
Scandinavians, Teutons, Italians, Russians, Poles--and they moved on in
forlorn apathy, like cattle driven to the slaughter. One wondered,
from the look of them, how they had raised their passage money, and how
many years' bitter self-denial it had cost them to provide for their
transit to the land of promise.

At the head of the gangway stood the steamboat doctors, for the
_Scarrowmania_ was taking out an unusual number of passengers, and
there were two of them. They were immaculate in blue uniform, and
looked very clean and English by contrast with the mass of frowsy
aliens. Beside them stood another official, presumably acting on
behalf of the Dominion Government, though there were few restrictions
imposed upon Canadian immigration then, nor for that matter did anybody
trouble much about the comfort of the steerage passengers. Though they
have altered all that latterly, each steamer, in a general way, carried
as many as she could hold.

As the stream poured out of the gangway, the doctor glanced at each new
comer's face, and then seizing him by the wrist uncovered it. Since
this took him two or three seconds, one could have fancied that he
either possessed peculiar powers, or that the test was a somewhat
inefficient one. Then he looked at the official, who made a sign, and
the man moved on.

In the meanwhile a group of first-class passengers leaning on the
thwart-ship rails close by looked on, with complacent satisfa