“Jimmie could not help my coming,” she said. “I should have found some way to get to the sloop. And he would not tell a secret.”
“So you did not mean to run away from us?” said Captain Enos. “I am glad of that, but how I will manage with you in Boston I know not, nor if I can find your father.”
Captain Enos’s sloop ran safely in among the islands, sailed across Boston Harbor without being noticed, and made fast at a wharf well known to Captain Enos, and where he was welcomed by an old acquaintance. Before dusk he had sold his cargo of fish at a good price, and Anne, wearing her scarlet stockings and new shoes, and holding fast to the captain’s hand, walked with him up the street to the house of the man who had been at the wharf when the sloop came in.
“They are good people, born in Wellfleet,” said the captain to Anne, as they walked along, “and I shall ask them to keep you over night. I shall sleep in the sloop, and to-morrow we will find out all we can about your father.”
The Freemans, for that was the name of Captain Enos’s friends, gave Anne a warm welcome Their house seemed very large and grand to the little girl. There was a carpet on the sitting-room floor, the first Anne had ever seen, and pictures on the walls, and a high mantel with tall brass candlesticks.
The room in which she slept seemed very wonderful to Anne. The bed was so high that she had to step up from a footstool to get in it, and then down, down she went in billows of feathers. In the morning one of the Freeman girls came in to waken her. She was a girl of about fifteen, with pretty, light, curling hair and blue eyes. She smiled pleasantly at Anne, and told her that there was a basin of warm water for her to bathe her face and hands in.
“I will brush out your hair for you, if you wish,” she said kindly.
But Anne said she could brush her own hair. Rose Freeman waited till Anne was quite ready for breakfast and went down the broad flight of stairs with her. Anne watched her new friend admiringly.
“She looks just like her name, just like a rose,” she said to herself, and resolved that she would remember and walk just as Rose did, and try and speak in the same pleasant way.
Before breakfast was finished Captain Enos came up from the wharves. He smiled as he looked at Anne’s bright face and smooth hair, and nodded approvingly. Then he and Mr. Freeman began to talk about the soldiers, and the best way to find John Nelson.