So Betty submitted to the inevitable, realizing that she wouldn’t have to carry the box at all, and proceeded to eat her breakfast.
“It is an awfully big box,” said Mrs. McGuire, as the carriage came to the door; “but if your party can’t eat all the things, you can give them to some children on the boat.”
“Oh, it’ll be all right,” said Betty, and kissing her mother good-by, she jumped into the carriage, and Pat drove her to the train.
There were few passengers at that early hour, and so there was ample room for the box on the seat beside her. Though Betty went often to New York, she rarely went alone, but as Dorothy and her aunt’s family were to meet her, she felt no responsibility as to traveling.
In Jersey City the conductor lifted the box out for her, and a convenient porter carried it to the ferry-boat.
“Hold it level,” Betty admonished him, and he touched his red cap and said “Yes’m,” and then carried the box with greatest care. Betty went by the Twenty-third Street Ferry, and in the ferry-house on the New York side she was to meet Dorothy, “under the clock.”
This tryst was a well-known one, for it made a definite place to meet in the crowded room.
Betty always enjoyed the long ferry, and she sat outside, with her precious box reposing on the seat beside her.
The morning was delightful, but it was growing warm and bade fair to be a very warm day.
Betty watched with interest the great steamer piers, and the traffic on the river, rejoicing to think that soon she would be sailing farther up the stream, where the banks were green and wooded, and the expanse of water unmarred by freight-boats and such unpicturesque craft.