“Dear Mr. Harrington, I thought you could tell us. Here is a girl named Nora McLaughlin, and here is her trunk, both left at the door by the milkman, and we do not know anything about where she belongs.”
“Insufficient address?” asked Harrington, professionally.
“Exactly. All she knows is that her brother is named John.”
“A great many of them are,” said Harrington, already writing on his memorandum book, and in his memory fixing the fact that a large, two-legged living parcel, insufficiently addressed, had been left at the wrong door for John McLaughlin; also a trunk, too large for delivery by the penny post.
“I will tell the other men, and if I was you I would send to the police.”
“Would you mind telling the first officer you meet? I hate to send my girls out.” And so she returned to Bulgaria.
But Bulgaria was ended, and Mrs. Conover handed her an article on “Antarctic Discovery.” She was again reading:—
“Under these circumstances Captain Wilkes, who had collected a boatload of stones from the front of the glacier,” when she gave back the “Forum” to Mrs. Conover. “Would you mind going on just a minute? “ she said, and ran out to meet the icecream man. So soon as he had left his tins she said,—
“Mr. Fridge, would you mind stopping at the Dudley School as you go home and telling Miss Lougee that there is a lost girl here?” etc.
Good Mr. Fridge was most eager to help, and the hostess returned, took the book again and read on with “the temperature, as they observed it, was 99 degrees C.; but, as the alcohol in their tins was frozen at the moment, there seemed reason to suspect the correctness of this observation.”