“I think they might have waited for us,” panted Mabel, no longer able to run. “They might have known we’d get lost.”
“It wasn’t their fault,” said Henrietta. “I should have asked them to wait. But that’s just like me. I’m always doing things on the spur of the moment and then wishing I hadn’t.”
“If we only knew where they were going to eat—”
“But we don’t. Mr. Black said that as long as our train was late getting in and we had missed our connection with the Hiltonburg train that we’d just check our baggage to the other station and walk about until time for lunch. After that we’d go some place to look at something—I’ve forgotten just what—and leave for Hiltonburg at three o’clock.”
“I wish I had my lunch right now,” wailed Mabel, dragging her hat into place and stuffing loose locks under it. “I’m hungry and I’m thirsty and my new shoes hurt my feet. It’s awfully noisy here and I don’t like being lost. I don’t like it—”
“Mabel,” warned Henrietta, “if you cry, I’ll run away and leave you here and then you’ll be a lot more lost than you are now. I’m just as much lost as you are, even if I have been in Chicago before. We’ll go along until we see a restaurant with ladies eating in it and we’ll go in and eat—”
“But we haven’t any money,” objected Mabel, dismally.
“If I remember rightly,” said Henrietta, after a moment’s deep thought, “they don’t ask for your money until after you’ve eaten. I think I know of a way to fix it. Wait a minute until I tidy you up a little. There are three dabs of soot on your face and your hair is all over the place. Of course we want to look as if we had money.”
“You always do,” said Mabel, “but I don’t.”
“Still,” consoled Henrietta, “you always look as if you’d had meals—as many as four or five a day.”