At last there came the morning when, everything finished, the Scollards were to leave the Patty-Pans. Jeunesse Dorée was protestingly strapped in his basket; the two least children were ready, Polly in charge of the yellow cat, Penny intrusted with Phyllis Lovelocks, Polly's doll; Penny's family was never fit to travel in the public eye. Laura's ship sailed in the forenoon, and from Hoboken, so that her family was to see her off, dine as best they could in their station and take the train for Crestville which left at two in the afternoon.
Bob was going with them. He was tempted to regret the added twelve months which entailed upon him the responsibility of increased age, and prevented his spending an uninterrupted summer in the country, as he had done the preceding year.
Miss Keren, crisp and brisk as usual in the excitement of marshaling her adopted family forever out of the pleasant little flat into a life of greater leisure and more opportunity, tied the strings of her little black straw bonnet with a snap. Then she picked up her gloves and turned from the window, with its background of jutting wall, which had been serving her as a mirror in lieu of mirrors packed and being moved out and into the vans below.
"Now, Laura, little girl, bid your old Aunt Keren good-bye, for I am going down to the Fifty-eighth Street house to receive these vans when they get there. I will meet you at the station, Charlotte, on the Hoboken side, of course. If anything happened that I didn't get there—as I shall unless these drivers are more than slow!—go right on to Crestville, and send Don Dolor down to the noon train to meet me to-morrow. Good-bye, Laura child. Remember to work hard at your music, but harder at your character. God bless you, dear."
Miss Keren walked away without a backward glance at the little Patty-Pans. But its proper tenants gave it many last looks as they slowly filed out. It had been home for nearly six years, and, "be it ever so flat, home is home," as Bob truthfully said. The Scollards left their own furniture slowly starting away from the house. The janitor and the hall boy waved them a farewell, but the Gordon flat was blank.
First among the crowd on the dock of the great white liner was Ralph, and just behind him was Snigs with their mother, and to their right all of Happie's E's, Robert Gaston and the von Siegeslieds, waiting the coming of the Scollards.
There was not much time for lingering; the Scollards were somewhat later in arriving than they had meant to be. The entire party crowded over the gangway and on to the swarming deck of the ship, amid the groups of gay, tearful, excited and tired people about to sail or to say good-bye.
There was time to inspect the stateroom which Laura was to share with Mrs. von Siegeslied, time to peep at the salon, and rapidly to glance at the decks and then to return to the stateroom to admire the flowers which had been sent by her pupils to her who had been Mrs. Stewart, and whose interesting change of name and fortune had been an absorbing topic for a day or two among her friends.
"Must you go, mamma?" asked Laura, looking white and helpless.
"I go west and you go east, Laura. Suppose I leave you here? Then after a little while Mrs. von Siegeslied will bring you out on deck and you will see us and wave to us as you steam out and we watch you from the dock!" proposed Mrs. Scollard cheerfully.