"It was a cruel question, cruelly asked," said Bess with some energy, as she pulled off her gloves and took off her hat, preparatory to a comfortable evening. "If people only knew how such remarks hurt! I wish I could save you from them, laddie."
At this moment, Rob came back to his seat, and remarked with conscious, but impenitent pride,—
"Didn't I just pay up that old woman? Mean old thing!"
Then he devoted his attention to the porter, as he converted the seats into diminutive bedrooms, partitioned and curtained off and sumptuously furnished with a mirror and a wall pocket.
Long after the boys were stowed away for the night, Bess could hear them whisper and giggle when a particularly loud snore from their next neighbor broke the stillness; and at each stopping-place she heard Rob's curtain fly up, to let him look out on the silent towns.
"Doesn't our Bess look matronly!" exclaimed Alice Rogers the next morning, when she saw Bess and her two companions coming towards her. "That one with her must be Fred Allen. Isn't he stunningly handsome, Jack?"
"Poor little cub!" said Jack sympathetically, as he hurried forward to meet them.
After the first confused moment of greeting and hand-shaking, question and answer, Alice, a plump blonde who still kept much of her girlish beauty, turned to the boys.
"Can this be my little cousin Rob, grown up to this?" she said, as she kissed him, to his secret disgust, for Rob scorned kisses except from Bess. "And this, I think, is Bessie's adopted boy, Fred, isn't it? I am so glad to have you both here, for I like boys almost as well as Bess does."
Two days later, Rob sat on the piazza at Island Den, painfully fulfilling his promise to write to his mother. Near him, Fred was swinging in a hammock, holding beside him the two-year-old daughter of the house. Little Alice had taken a violent fancy to the boy, who amused himself with her by the hour at a time. Up-stairs, in the warm August morning, the two sisters were lounging and talking "like magpies," as Jack had said when he left them. And this is what Rob wrote:—