They fell to plucking, now here, now there.

The sun had got low when they retraced their steps to the train, and the chill of evening long since had set in.

“You—­you ought to told me it was so late.”

“I didn’t know it myself, Miss Miriam.”

“Let’s hurry.  Mamma won’t know where—­how—­”

“We’ll make it back in thirty minutes.”

“Let’s run for that train.”

“Give me your hand.”

They were off and against the wind, their faces thrust forward and upward.  Homeward in the coach they were strangely silent, this time his hat in her lap.  At the entrance to her apartment-house he left her with reiterated farewells.

“Then I can come to-morrow night, Miss Miriam?”

“Y-yes.”  And she stepped into the elevator.  He waved through the trellis-work, as she moved upward, brandishing his hat.  She answered with a flourish of her bunch of violets.

“Good-by!”

At the threshold her mother met her, querulous and in the midst of adjusting summer covers to furniture.

“How late!  I hope, Miriam, right away you had the steamer-trunk sent up.  Good berths—­good state-rooms you got?  What you got in that paper, that aloes root I told you to get against seasickness?  Gimme and right away I boil it.”

“No, no, don’t touch them!  They—­they’re violets.  Let me put them in water with wet tissue-paper over them.”

* * * * *

To the early clattering of that faithful chariot of daybreak, the milk-wagon, and with the April dawn quivering and flushing over the roofs of houses, Mrs. Binswanger rose from her restless couch and into a black flannelette wrapper.

“Simon, wake up!  How a man can sleep like that the day what he starts for Europe!”

To her husband’s continued and stentorian evidences of sleep she tiptoed to the adjoining bedroom, slippered feet sloughing as she walked.

“Girls!”

Only their light breathing answered her.  Atop the bed-coverlet her younger daughter’s hand lay upturned, the fingers curling toward the palm.

“Ray!  Miriam!”

Miriam stirred and burrowed deeper into her pillow, her hair darkly spread against the white in a luxury of confusion.

“Girls!”

“What, mamma?”

“Five o’clock, Miriam, and we ain’t got the trunks strapped yet, or that seasick medicine from Mrs. Berkovitz.”

“For Heaven’s sake, mamma, the boat don’t sail till three o’clock this afternoon!  There’s plenty time.  Go back to bed awhile, mamma.”

“When such a trip I got before me as twelve days on water, I don’t lay me in bed until the last minute.  Ray, get up and help mamma.  In a minute the milkman comes, and I want you should tell him we don’t take no more for ten weeks.  Get up, Ray, and help mamma see that all the windows is locked tight.”

“M-m-m-m.”