It was after the car was quiet that night that Genevieve, in her upper berth, pulled apart the heavy curtains and peeped out into the long narrow aisle between the swaying draperies.
The train was moving very rapidly. The air was heavy and close. The night was an uncomfortably warm one. Genevieve had been too excited to sleep. Even yet it did not seem quite real—that the Happy Hexagons were all there with her, and that they were going to her far-away Texas home.
With a sigh the girl fell back on her pillow, and tried to coax sleep to come to her. But sleep refused to come. Instead, the whole panorama of her Eastern winter unrolled itself before her, peopled with little fairy sprites, who danced with twinkling feet and smiled at her mockingly.
"Oh, yes, I know you," murmured Genevieve, drowsily. "I know you all. You—you little black one—you're the cake I forgot in the oven, and let burn up. And you're the lessons I didn't learn—there are heaps of you! And you—you're those horrid scales I never could catch up with. My, how you run now! And you—you little shamed one over in the corner—you're the prank I played on Miss Jane. . . . Oh, you can dance now—but you won't, by and by! Next year there won't be any of you—not a one left. I'm going to be so good, so awfully good; and I'm not going to ever forget, or to cause anybody any trouble, or—"
With a start Genevieve sat erect in her berth, fully awake.
"Mercy! What a jounce that was!" she cried, just above her breath. "But we seem to be going all right now."
Cautiously she parted her curtains and peeped out again. The next instant she almost gave a little shriek: she was looking straight into Bertha Brown's upraised, startled eyes, just below her.
"Was that an accident?" chattered Bertha. "I told you there'd be one! I'm all dressed, anyhow—if 'tis!"
"Sh-h! No, goosey," chuckled Genevieve.
She would have said more but, at that moment, from up the aisle sounded a sibilant "S-s-s-s!" They turned to see a somewhat untidy fluff of red hair above a laughing, piquant face.