“Yeah ’m I?” returned the only one of Aunt Betty’s household-women who dared to trust herself on board a boat “to lib.” She was Methuselah’s mother and as his imposing name was read, answered for him; while the “cabin boy and general utility man” ducked his woolly head beneath her skirts, for once embarrassed by the attention he received.
“Miss Calvert, did you know that you make the thirteenth person?” asked Aurora Blank, who had kept tally on her white-gloved fingers.
“I hope I do—there’s ‘luck in odd numbers’ one hears. But I’m not—I’m not! Auntie, Jim, look yonder—quick! It’s Melvin! It surely is!”
With a cry of delight Dorothy now rushed down the pier to where a street-car had just stopped and a lad alighted. She clasped his hands and fairly pumped them up and down in her eagerness, but she didn’t offer to kiss him though she wanted to do so. She remembered in time that the young Nova Scotian was even shyer than James Barlow and mustn’t be embarrassed. But her questions came swiftly enough, though his answers were disappointing.
However, she led him straight to Mrs. Calvert, his one-time hostess at Deerhurst, and there was now no awkward shyness in his respectful greeting of her, and the acknowledgment he made to the general introductions which followed.
Seating himself on a rail close to Mrs. Betty’s chair he explained his presence.
“The Judge sent me to Baltimore on some errands of his own, and after they were done I was to call upon you, Madam, and say why her father couldn’t spare Miss Molly so soon again. He missed her so much, I fancy, while she was at San Leon ranch, don’t you know, and she is to go away to school after a time—that’s why. But——”
The lad paused, colored, and was seized by a fit of his old bashfulness. He had improved wonderfully during the year since he had been a member of “Dorothy’s House Party” and had almost conquered that fault. No boy could be associated for so long a time with such a man as Judge Breckenridge and fail to learn much; but it wasn’t easy to offer himself as a substitute for merry Molly, which he had really arrived to do.