“Just pure bread and nothing more.”
“But your eyes?” she persisted.
“Just your imagination, my dear young lady,” he answered, smiling again as he hurried away.
Nevertheless, in another two hours, Billie had bundled her friends into their steamer chairs on deck, and they were drinking hot broth with much relish.
It was true that the storm had subsided. The wind had died down and the sun was shining cheerfully. Perhaps, after all, it was the change in the weather that had effected so complete a cure.
CHAPTER II.—LITTLE ARTHUR.
When a ship is small and the passengers are few, it becomes a floating home for one family. Everybody comes to know everybody else very well indeed after the second day out. The captain is the father of the family, and there is a great deal of talk about small, unimportant things.
So it was with the ship which bore our Motor Maids and Miss Helen Campbell to Europe. Every morning at eleven o’clock when the steward appeared with a tray of bouillon and biscuit, certain of the ship’s forty passengers gathered about the Motor Maids in friendly intercourse. At least, already it seemed every morning, because this made the second time.
Reclining lazily in steamer chairs or leaning on the deck rail, the four girls chatted with their new friends.
“As I was saying,” observed Nancy to Feargus O’Connor, the young man whose dish of finnan haddie had made Elinor so ill the first day out, and who proved to be the secretary of the older man, Mr. Kalisch, “there is some mystery about him, I am sure.”