"I see you are beginning to understand now!" said Mrs. Belknap; then she added plaintively, "I wish I'd never hired that girl, Jimmy!"
"I suppose there's very little use in asking why you persist in hanging on to her?" said Mr. Belknap.
"Don't you see, dear, it wouldn't do a bit of good to send her away now; indeed, I feel as if it were almost my duty to keep her." Mrs. Belknap said this with the resigned air of a martyr; and Mr. Belknap wisely forebore to make any comment upon the surprising statement.
* * * * * *
It was delightfully fresh and breezy on the trolley car; and Jane on the front seat keenly enjoyed the noisy rush through the green, daisied fields and woods cool with shade and fragrant with wild flowers and young ferns. In the streets of the villages through which the car passed on its way to the ferry there was a brilliant flutter of flags, the unfamiliar stars and stripes looking strange and foreign in Jane's English eyes. Everywhere there were holiday crowds, little girls in white frocks and shoes, bearing wreaths and bunches of flowers; little boys in their best clothes with tiny flags in their buttonholes; women carrying babies, and men carrying lunch baskets, and other and bigger babies; showily dressed young girls with their beaux; besides a multitude of the unattached eagerly going somewhere. Jane felt herself to be very small and lonely and far from home in the midst of it all.
She had planned to spend her unexpected holiday with Bertha Forbes, and when at the end of her journey she was informed by Miss Forbes's landlady that Miss Forbes had departed to New Jersey for the day, she turned away with a feeling of disappointment which almost amounted to physical pain. What should she do? Where should she go, alone in the great unfamiliar city of New York?
There were numberless excursions by boat and train and flag-decked barges, and the throng of sightseers of every nationality jostled one another good-humoredly, as they surged to and fro under the hot sun in the narrow space at the terminals of the elevated and subway roads. Jane's sad, bewildered little face under the brim of her unfashionable hat attracted the attention of more than one passer-by, as she slowly made her way to the ferry ticket office. She was going directly back to Staten Island, with no better prospect in view then to pass the day alone on the back porch of Mrs. Belknap's house, when the might-have-been-expected unexpected happened; she came face to face with John Everett, cool and handsome in his light summer suit and Panama hat. The young man had evidently just landed from a Staten Island boat, and his grim face brightened as his eyes lit upon Jane, hastily attempting to conceal her small person behind a burly German woman bearing a bundle, a basket, and a brace of babies in her capacious arms.
"Jane!" exclaimed Mr. Everett; "how glad I am to have met you. Where were you going?"
"I am going back to Staten Island directly, sir."
"To do what?"