and dull.  For a time a few eccentric faces or dresses among the other sightseers penetrated through this merciful insensibility, but by noon the capacity for even so much observation as this had left them.  They set one foot before the other, they directed their eyes upon the multitudinous objects exhibited, they nodded their heads to comments made by the others, but if asked suddenly what they had just seen in the room last visited, neither of them could have made the faintest guess.

At half-past twelve, their aunt and mother, highly self-congratulatory over the educational morning, voted that enough was as good as a feast, and led their stunned and stupefied charges away to Aunt Victoria’s hotel for lunch.

It was while they were consuming this exceedingly appetizing meal that Sylvia saw, threading his way towards them between the other tables, a tall, weedy, expensively dressed young man, with a pale freckled face and light-brown hair.  When he saw her eyes on him he waved his hand, a largely knuckled hand, and grinned.  Then she saw that it was not a young man, but a tall boy, and that the boy was Arnold.  The quality of the grin reminded her that she had always liked Arnold.

His arrival, though obviously unexpected to the last degree, caused less of a commotion than might have seemed natural.  It was as if this were for Aunt Victoria only an unexpected incident in a general development, quite resignedly anticipated.  After he had shaken hands with everybody, and had sat down and ordered his own luncheon very capably, his stepmother remarked in a tolerant tone, “You didn’t get my telegram, then?” He shook his head:  “I started an hour or so after I wired you.  We’d gone down to the town with one of the masters for a game with Concord.  There was a train just pulling out as we went by the station, and I ran and jumped on.”

“How’d you know where it was going?” challenged Judith.

“I didn’t,” he explained lightly.  He looked at her with the teasing, provocative look of masculine seventeen for feminine thirteen.  “Same old spitfire, I see, Miss Judy,” he said, his command of unhackneyed phrases by no means commensurate with his desire to be facetious.

Judith frowned and went on eating her eclair in silence.  It was the first eclair she had ever eaten, and she was more concerned with it than with the new arrival.

Nobody made any comment on Arnold’s method of beginning journeys until Mrs. Marshall asked, “What did you do it for?” She put the question with an evident seriousness of inquiry, not at all with the rhetorical reproach usually conveyed in the formula she used.

Arnold looked up from the huge, costly, bloody beefsteak he was eating and, after an instant’s survey of the grave, kind, face opposite him, answered with a seriousness like her own, “Because I wanted to get away.”  He added after a moment, laughing and looking again at the younger girl, “I wanted to come out and pull Judy’s hair again!” He spoke with his mouth full, and this made him entirely a boy and not at all the young man his well-cut clothes made him appear.