All the way to Chudstone Emmeline laughed and chattered eagerly. She was trying hard to pretend to herself that she was doing a right and matter-of-course thing in setting off to Eastwich to find her little brother, without saying a word to any of the elders; but, if she had really thought so at the bottom of her heart, she would not have gone out of her way to take the train at Chudstone.
‘I don’t quite know what time the 2.10 gets to Chudstone,’ she had remarked to Kitty, ‘but as it must be a few minutes later than the time it leaves Woodsleigh, it must be all right if I count it 2.10, just as usual.’ The Wednesday 2.10 was well known to Emmeline, for it was the special train run for the weekly half-day excursion to Eastwich, and Aunt Grace had sometimes travelled by it.
‘I do wish I was big, too, and could come with you, Emmeline!’ said Kitty, as she waited on Chudstone platform, while Emmeline leaned out of a carriage-window for those final words of parting, which are so necessary to all railway-travellers, and so inconvenient to the other people already established in the compartment. ‘It will be horribly dull all alone.’
‘You will have Punch, you know,’ Emmeline reminded her—Punch had not been brought with them, because his nervousness at railway-stations was apt to show itself in ways which made his friends nervous in their turn—‘and if you feel lonely without me, you’ll just have to think that I’m gone to fetch Micky home.’
The next moment the train was in motion, and Emmeline was sinking back into her seat with the echo of her own words ringing in her ears. How grand and grown-up it sounded to be going into Eastwich to fetch somebody home! She could not help glancing at her travelling companions—an elderly farmer’s wife, with a portly figure and a profusion of jet ornaments, and a flashy young woman who might be her daughter—to see whether they were duly impressed. But they seemed so much more interested in one another than in Emmeline, that a dreary sense of insignificance stole over her, and she began to find it harder and harder to think of herself as an important elder sister, instead of a lonely little girl doing what most people would consider a very naughty thing.
Half an hour’s journey in the train brought her to Eastwich Station, where she alighted, feeling strange and bewildered, and not quite sure what to do next. A harassed porter jostled her with an impatient ‘If you please!’ An agitated old lady, whose luggage appeared to have somehow misbehaved, begged her to ‘get out of my way, little girl.’ Emmeline remembered the last time she had been on that platform, when she had been going to see Mary. For one moment she felt half inclined to go to Mary now, and pour out the story of all the troubles and mistakes and naughtinesses of the last two days to her old nurse. But then Mary would be so very much surprised and disappointed in Emmeline. No, she could not go there while Micky was still lost in Green Ginger Land. Perhaps they would go to Mary when once she had brought him safe out of the clutches of that dreadful Mother Grimes. It would be so much easier to set things in a fair light then.
Well, she supposed the first thing to do would be to ask her way to Green Ginger Land. She made the inquiry of a chance porter. ‘I’m sure I don’t know, miss. Ask a policeman,’ was his hurried and indifferent answer as he trundled away a great barrowful of trunks and boxes.
Policemen seemed scarce in Eastwich that day, and Emmeline had wandered some little way out of the station before she came across one.
‘Green Ginger Land!’ he repeated, looking at her oddly. ‘That’s not a fit place for a little lady like you to go all alone.’