“It’s Arnold again!” she told them, with a resigned gesture.  She laid down the time-table she had been consulting and drew Mrs. Marshall to the window for a low-voiced explanation.  When she came back, “I’m so sorry, dears, to cut short even by a single day this charming time together,” she told the girls.  “But the news I’ve been getting from Arnold’s school—­there’s nothing for me to do but to stop everything and take him back there to see what can be done to patch things up.”  She spoke with the patient air of one inured to the sacrifices involved in the upbringing of children.  “We leave on the eleven-forty—­oh, I am so sorry!  But it would have been only one day more.  I meant to get you both a dress—­I’ve ’phoned to have them sent to you.”

The rest was only the dreary, bustling futility of the last moments before train-time—­kisses, remarks about writing more often; a promise from Aunt Victoria to send Sylvia from time to time a box of old dresses and fineries as material for her niece’s dressmaking skill;—­from Arnold, appearing at the last minute, a good deal of rather flat, well-meant chaffing, proffered with the most entire unconcern as to the expressed purpose of their journey; and then the descent through long, mirrored, softly carpeted corridors to the classic beauty of the Grecian temple where the busy men, with tired eyes, came and went hurriedly, treading heavily on their heels.  Outside was the cab, Arnold extremely efficient in browbeating the driver as to the stowing away of bags, more kisses, in the general cloud of which Arnold pecked shyly at Sylvia’s ear and Judith’s chin; then the retreating vehicle with Arnold standing up, a tall, ungainly figure, waving a much-jointed hand.

After it was out of sight the three watchers looked at each other in a stale moment of anticlimax.

“Arnold’s horrid, isn’t he?” said Judith thoughtfully.

“Why, I like him!” opposed Sylvia.

“Oh, I like him, all right,” said Judith.

Then both girls looked at their mother.  What next ...?  They were not to have gone back to La Chance until the next night.  Would this change of plans alter their schedule?  Mrs. Marshall saw no reason why it should.  She proposed a sightseeing expedition to a hospital.  Miss Lindstroem, the elderly Swedish woman who worked among the destitute negroes of La Chance, had a sister who was head-nurse in the biggest and newest hospital in Chicago, and she had written very cordially that if her sister’s friends cared to inspect such an institution, she was at their service.  Neither of the girls having the slightest idea of what a hospital was like, nor of any other of the sights in the city which they might see instead, no objection was made to this plan.