Now Miss Fisher’s car-sickness has a great deal to do with the story. She was honestly feeling that she could not endure another hour in the train, when she received a telegram at Albany. Friends of hers, whom she had not seen in months, a nice girl and her even nicer brother (so Miss Fisher thought), wired that they would meet her at the train in Pittsfield and whisk her away for a blissful week-end in the Berkshires before she went on to her aunt’s house in Boston. For an instant Miss Fisher thought of duty and the tiresome, unruly child she had agreed to chaperon. Then she thought of the deadly hours in the train, and the nice girl’s even nicer brother.
Miss Fisher lurched out into the car and captured Jacqueline. To Jacqueline she explained that she had to leave the train at Pittsfield, and that Jacqueline would remain in the care of the conductor and the porter till she reached Baring Junction, where those officials would deliver her to her great-aunt. Jacqueline was of course to be a very good girl.
“Sure!” promised Jacqueline—too readily, a suspicious person might have thought.
But Miss Fisher was too fluttered with her own affairs to be suspicious. She tripped gayly off the train at Pittsfield, into the arms of her friends, and out of this story. Of course her conduct was quite blameworthy, and so Jacqueline’s Aunt Edie and several other people said later. Just the same Jacqueline should not have called her a fish, and certainly not a piece of cheese.
The moment Miss Fisher’s rumpled blue linen skirt had vanished from the car, Jacqueline laid hold of Caroline’s suitcase and, like a valorous small ant with a huge crumb, tugged it into the drawing-room. Caroline snatched up her hat and her sweater, and with Mildred in her arms followed after protesting.
“You come along,” Jacqueline over-rode her protests. “We can sprawl all we want to in here, and people won’t stop to stare at Mildred, and ask us our names, and do we like to travel. Wouldn’t they be peeved if we asked them questions like that, without being introduced?”
So Caroline and Jacqueline and Mildred settled down to enjoy the privacy and comfort of the drawing-room, without the disadvantages of Miss Fisher’s presence. But somehow they didn’t enjoy themselves much. For they couldn’t forget—that is, Caroline and Jacqueline couldn’t, for I don’t know about Mildred—that the pretty little gold watch on Jacqueline’s wrist, with its madly racing minute-hand, was tearing away the hours, so very few now, before the train reached Baring Junction.
“I’m going to have a rotten summer,” complained Jacqueline. “Oh, I wish I’d made Aunt Edie let me go to a camp! Great-aunt Eunice is as old as the hills and Cousin Penelope is most as old. It will be poky at their house, and I can’t do this, or Aunt Eunice will be scared, and I can’t do that, or Cousin Penelope will scold. Oh, shivering chimpanzees! I wish I’d gone to camp!”
But poor little Caroline had no words for the misery that possessed her, as the minutes ran by and the hour came nearer that should deliver her into the hands of grudging strangers.
“I—I hope half-aunt Martha’s boys aren’t big,” she confided to Jacqueline. “I—I’m afraid of boys.”