Jacqueline play-acted all over the place. She dropped the suitcase and fairly flew to meet the stranger.
“Oh, half-aunt Martha,” she cried loudly, and cast herself into the woman’s arms.
“My goodness, child,” said Mrs. Martha Conway. “Don’t knock the breath out of a body!”
She kissed Jacqueline soundly on the cheek.
“I kind of suspect you’re Caroline,” she said, with a twinkle in her gray eyes. “Give me hold of that suitcase. I’d have had one of the boys here to help us—they were all crazy to come meet their cousin—but I wanted room in the car so as to get your trunk, and I just brought Nellie along.”
All the while she talked, half-aunt Martha had been hurrying along the station platform, and hurrying Jacqueline and the suitcase with her, much as the Red Queen hurried Alice in the Looking Glass Country, you will remember. They now turned a corner of the station, and there in the shade opposite the open door of the baggage room stood a dingy-looking Ford. In the Ford was a sun-browned little girl of six in a stiffly starched gingham dress, who smiled and waved her hand to them.
“You keep on sitting, Nellie,” called Aunt Martha. “Where’s your trunk-check, Caroline?”
“Gee! I forgot all about it,” said Jacqueline ruefully.
“You can’t have,” Aunt Martha told her, patiently but firmly. “Look in your pockets—in your sweater pocket.”
“It isn’t there,” Jacqueline confessed. She hardly knew whether to laugh at herself or be annoyed. She looked at Aunt Martha’s anxious face, and decided she wouldn’t laugh.