A second foot was on the carriage step when he went back,—a very small foot,—though to which of the young ladies it belonged he could not tell. He had seen neither distinctly at the station, it was raining so hard, but he felt intuitively that it was Miss Helen whom Jeff was advising to keep still till Mr. Hilton came to fetch her.
“Oh, thanks; don’t drop me, please,” she said, putting her arms around his neck as if afraid of falling.
He felt her breath through the dampness of the night, and as Mrs. Taylor just then held her lamp higher, he caught sight of two bright, laughing eyes, and if he held her a little closer than he had held the older woman, it was not strange. He was young, and she was young, and would have flirted in her coffin had she life to do it.
“I hope you are not very wet. It is a nasty night,” he said, as he put her down by her mother.
“Not wet at all, thanks to your kindness; but please go back for Alice,” the lady said, as he showed signs of having forgotten there was another to be cared for.
Alice didn’t need him. Jeff was attending to her.
“I don’t want to be lifted. I’m not afraid of a little wetting; but hold the umbrella over me. I shouldn’t like to spoil my hat,” she said, and, gathering up her dress, she ran swiftly into the house, followed by a girl, presumably the maid, as she carried several bags and began to talk to the ladies in what to Jeff was an unknown tongue.
Mrs. Mason’s rooms were on the other side of the hotel, but Craig was in the office when the carriage drove up, and saw Mark carrying two of its occupants into the house, and saw a third dashing like a sprite through the rain under the cover of Jeff’s umbrella, while the fourth followed more leisurely. Bidding Uncle Zach goodnight, he went to his mother’s room and said to her: “The Tracys have come.”
CHAPTER VII.
THE TRACYS.
On a morning in June, before our story opens, Mrs. Freeman Tracy sat in her breakfast room looking over the papers, hoping to find some advertisement for a pleasant and inexpensive place in which to spend the summer. She had just returned from Europe, and her twelve trunks were not yet all unpacked. So far as real estate, houses and lands were concerned she was rich, but some of the investments on which she depended largely for ready money had failed, and she felt the necessity of retrenching for a time.