From this point, she could not help but watch all the glad meetings about her, of sisters and brothers and husbands and wives, and various other relationships (there were some she was quite positive were fathers and daughters), and she watched them with something like envy; for so far as she could tell, everyone who had got off the train had been immediately seized by some person who seemed superlatively glad to see him or her. Yes, every human being but Arethusa Worthington seemed to have been met by somebody.
Then a cold little fear clutched at her heart; suppose.... Suppose.... she had made a mistake and this was not Lewisburg, after all!
But it must be! Had not the brakeman accommodatingly told her so right in her very own ear? And the Cherrys had been going to Lewisburg, and they had got off with Arethusa. She was surely in the right station.
The next most natural supposition was that no one had come to meet her. And then the wildest and most unreasoning terror of this situation, directly grown from some of those travellers' tales of her aunts' weaving, overwhelmed Arethusa. She stood closer to the pillar as a sort of protection.
Such an Ending to the Joyfully Begun Journey!
The Cherry family had been so long in their greetings that they were among the last to pass by the unmet traveller and her pillar. Mrs. Cherry, seeing that the girl was alone, crossed the platform to her, the whole collection of Cherrys trailing in her rear.
"Found your Pa yet, dearie?" she asked cheerfully.
"This is the pretty Miss Worth'ton I was telling you about we saw on the train, Cherry," to her husband, and "This is Helen Louise's Pa," to Arethusa.
Arethusa managed to acknowledge this introduction, but being in such a state of mind as she was, she could not make her acknowledgment very cordial.
Helen Louise was dancing up and down and hanging on to one hand of a man who could have been nothing else but a close relation to the little girl, pale blue eyes and pale eyebrows and all. The daughter certainly favored "her Pa considerable" as her mother had said.