time to pack up an excellent little lunch for
her.

"It is in the bag you told me to put in the cloakroom," she said. "If you
do not mind very much, would you be so kind as to come and help me to get
it out. I do not like going there alone."

"What! are you shy?" said Eleanor, with considerable amusement, and
to herself she wondered why her grandfather had let such a very
inexperienced girl as this travel alone. But in spite of Margaret's
shyness Miss Carson felt quite interested in her new acquaintance. There
was a serious, old-fashioned air about her that made her unlike any other
girl that Miss Carson had ever met, and, as it was shortly to transpire,
she had known a great many, and was therefore competent to give an
opinion on that point. Margaret's very speech was different to that of
other girls. It was so slow and careful, and she appeared to phrase her
sentence with a deliberation that Miss Carson found both quaint and
pleasing. Decidedly, she thought, this chance acquaintance was worth
passing the next hour or so with, if only for the sake of the secret
amusement she was affording her, and so, at Margaret's timid request, she
rose willingly enough and accompanied her to the cloakroom. Then, having
recovered the bag, they returned to the waiting-room, which they were
glad to find was still unoccupied by any one else.

Inside the bag there was a tin biscuit-box, the contents of which, when
spread out on the table, made quite a tempting-looking lunch. There were
chicken and tongue sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, covered jam puffs,
grapes, raisins, and almonds, and a bottle of delicious home-made
lemonade.

In her determination that Miss Margaret's holiday should begin pleasantly
with a good luncheon on the journey, Lizzie had put up enough for two
persons at least.

"Perhaps," said Margaret gleefully, when she had persuaded Eleanor to
abandon her buns and to share this sumptuous meal, "she knew that I
should meet a friend. Do you know," she added, "that this is the very
first picnic I have ever attended in my life, though I have read of them,
of course, in books."

CHAPTER V

ELEANOR CARSON

A picnic! Eleanor was conscious of a sudden feeling of pity for her newly
made acquaintance. She called this meal, partaken of in the dusty, dingy
little waiting-room of a noisy junction in company with a girl whom an
hour ago she had never met, a picnic.

Memories of gay, delightful river picnics, of mountai