“We’ll unstrap the suitcase,” said Aunt Martha, as she placed the suitcase on a packing-box. “Don’t worry, Caroline. It must be somewhere. I knew a woman once that always kept her trunk-check in the toe of her bedshoe when she went on a long train trip. And even if we don’t find it, we can prove property and claim your trunk. What kind of a trunk was it?”
“I—I don’t know,” said Jacqueline feebly. She could feel her cheeks burning, and the tears of vexation rising to her eyes. For she fully believed that everything was going to be spoiled right at the outset. And somehow, as she looked at Aunt Martha’s weather-beaten anxious face and steady gray eyes, she felt that it would not be what she would call a picnic to explain to Aunt Martha why she didn’t know what her own trunk looked like, and how she came to stand here in the soiled white shoes of Caroline Tait.
But Martha Conway saw in Jacqueline’s confusion only the natural distress of a child, who was tired with a long journey and frightened at the prospect of losing all her little possessions.
“Don’t cry!” she bade briskly. “’Twon’t help matters. Nothing’s lost, if you know where ’tis, as the sea-cook said when he dropped the tea-kettle overboard, and that check must just be in this suitcase somewheres.”
She had the straps unfastened by this time and the lid lifted.
“My, what a hoorah’s nest!” she murmured, and indeed Jacqueline’s hasty incursion into the suitcase, in search of Mildred’s wardrobe, had utterly disarranged Caroline’s neat garments.
Aunt Martha turned over the pink and white soiled gingham and the discarded underwear. She felt in the toe of each of the worn bedshoes, and looked disappointed at finding nothing in them. She shook out the nightgown. But though she looked more and more anxious, and though her silence made Jacqueline feel more and more what a real disaster to Caroline and to Caroline’s people the loss of a mere trunk would be, she did not once scold.
At the bottom of the suitcase were Caroline’s comb and brush, in a chintz case with the initials F. T. worked on it in cross-stitch, and a little chintz handkerchief-case, with the same initials. Aunt Martha opened the handkerchief-case and smiled with relief as she saw on top of the handkerchiefs the clumsy oblong of the pasteboard trunk-check.
“Well, now,” she said, “you were a good girl to put it away so carefully, only next time don’t go and forget where you put it. Now I’ll go right and get the baggage man to put the trunk into the Ford. I suppose there’ll be room. Or did you bring a Saratoga, Caroline?”
“The trunk isn’t exactly what you might call big,” murmured Jacqueline non-committally. She certainly hoped it wasn’t. What mightn’t it be like, this unknown trunk of Caroline’s that was now her trunk?