“Can she be the woman who asked me questions in that eating place, way back there in the little city by the sea?” she asked herself. And then, “How could it be?”
“Oh!” she exclaimed, stopping short. “I can’t go with you boys. I must not!”
“Aw, come on!” a boy from Texas begged. “You’ll never see a thing like it again.”
“We won’t be gone an hour.”
“Sure! Sure! You must come!”
They were such nice boys and she knew so well what it must mean to be escorting a real American girl in such a place, that she yielded and came along.
“And yet, I shouldn’t do it,” she told herself.
Before they were gone she received a second shock. Just as they were all piling into the car, a small man and a camel came shambling down the road.
“Can he be the little man I saw at the port?” she asked herself. It gave her a shock to think that this little man and the woman in black had somehow made their way here before them. This thought, as far as the little man was concerned, was short-lived. When he had come closer she saw that he was shorter than the other man, that his face was rounder, and there was a scar across his left cheek. She heaved a sigh on making this discovery, but her relief was not to be of long duration.
And so they rattled away, nine boys and a lady, the first they had seen in many a day.