"Where are they all?" Jeff fingered the envelope reluctantly. "I don't like opening other people's messages."
"I don't know where they are, that's it. Doctor took Miss Charlotte and Ranny off after lunch in his machine, and Mis' Peyton and Lucy have gone to town with your mother. Doctor Andy wouldn't like it if his friends came without anybody to meet 'em."
Jeff tore open the dispatch. "The first two words will tell me, I suppose," he said. "Hello--yes, you're right! They'll be here on the five-ten. That's"--he pulled out his watch--"why, there's barely time to get to the station now! This must have been delayed. You say you don't know where anybody is?"
"Not a soul. Doctor usually leaves word, but he didn't this time."
"I'll telephone the hospital," and Jeff hurried to Doctor Churchill's desk. In a minute he had learned that the doctor had come and gone for the last time that day. He looked at Mrs. Fields.
"You'll have to go, Mr. Jeff," said she. "I know Doctor Andy's ways. He'd as soon let company go without their dinners as not be on hand when their train came in. He wasn't expecting the Lees till to-morrow."
"Of course," said Jeff, "I'll go, since there's nobody else. How am I to know 'em? Young man and sick girl? All right, that's easy," and he was off to catch a car at the corner.
As he rode into town, however, he was rebelling against the situation. "This guest business is being overdone," he observed to himself. "These people are probably some more off the Peyton piece of cloth. An invalid girl lying round on couches for Fiddle to wait on--another Lucy, probably, only worse, because she's ill. Well, I'm not going to be any more cordial than the law calls for. I'll have to bring 'em out in a carriage, I suppose. She'll be too limp for the trolley."
He reached the station barely in time to engage a carriage before the train came in. He took up his position inside the gates through which all passengers must pass from the train-shed into the great station.
"Looking for somebody?" asked a voice at his elbow.