"You'll be late," she warned.
But still he hesitated. "How in the dickens am I going to know the child? I haven't the remotest idea what she's like. I may miss her altogether. I think I need you."
His statement of not knowing what Arethusa was like was perfectly true, for in none of her letters had Miss Eliza once mentioned Arethusa's personal appearance and Elinor had never thought to ask about it.
"You should have told her," he continued, almost reproachfully, "to wear a red carnation or something. I am quite sure I shan't be able to find her. And you're so much smarter than I am. Your woman's intuition is a great thing to have in a search, You better come go 'long."
Elinor came down the walk to where he was and gave him a push. "Do go on, Ross. You really will miss her altogether, if you don't. And I haven't time to dress now, so I can't possibly go. She probably looks like her mother or some member of the family."
"Now, I don't know about that," he answered, still lingering. "She may not at all. I don't look like my mother, and you...."
"Oh, please go on and stop fooling!" Though she laughed, his wife's patience was ebbing. It would be dreadful for Arethusa to come and find no one to meet her. "You always hurry so, Ross, when there's no real necessity for it and won't when there is!"
Ross decided that the moment for actual departure was certainly at hand, so he made haste to the automobile.
Arethusa, after descending from the train with her satchel and purse still clutched firmly, followed the crowd across the tracks under the shed, toward the iron gates she had to pass through to reach the station proper. Her busy grey eyes had failed to find anyone among those menfolks just around the train who at all resembled her mental picture of her father. And as she hurried after the crowd, still watching for him, it seemed to Arethusa that there were more people in this comparatively small space than she had ever seen in one company before, in all of her life. So many of them were men, she noted; so many of them were men with nice faces who might have been the fathers of travelling daughters they had come to meet.
She felt a sudden and most unexpected bewilderment sweep over her as she looked about. How would she ever find her father here, among all these hundreds and hundreds of people? She was carried along, unresisting in her panic, clear through the gates without being aware she had passed them, and pushed aside by the impatient throng against one of the iron pillars that supported the roof of the platform at one side of the station.