“Oh, do I have to get out?” she said.  “I ain’t been in this place for twenty-five years, and I was to be met.”

The porter’s grin hovered comfortingly over her head.

“You can stay here jus’ ’s long as you like, ma’am,” he yelled, in the voice of a train dispatcher.  “I’ll send your friends in when they inquiahs.”

Aunt Mary eyed him gratefully, and gave him the nickel which she had been carefully holding in her hand for the last hour.

Then she looked up, and saw Jack!

A perfectly splendid Jack, in resplendent attire, handsome, beaming, with a big bouquet of violets in his hand!

“For you, Aunt Mary,” he said, and dropped them into her lap, and hugged her fervently.  She clung to him with a cling that forgot the immediate past, disinheriting and all.  Oh! she was so glad to see him!

The porter approached with a beneficent look.

“Has he taken good care of you, Aunt Mary?” Jack asked, as the man gathered up the things and they started to leave the car.

“Yes, indeed,” Aunt Mary declared.

So Jack gave the porter a dollar.

Then they left the train.

“I was so worried,” Aunt Mary said, as she went along the platform hanging on her nephew’s arm.  “I thought you’d met with an accident.”

“I couldn’t get on until the rest got off,” he said, gazing down on her with a smile; “but I was on hand, all right.  My, but it’s good to think that you’re here, Aunt Mary!  Maybe you think that I don’t appreciate your taking all this trouble for me, but I do, just the same.”

Aunt Mary smiled all over.  Everyone who passed them was smiling, too, and that added to the general joy of the atmosphere.  Aunt Mary felt proud of Jack, and rejoiced as to herself.  Her content with life in general was, for the moment, limitless.  She did not stop to dissect the sources of her delight.  She was not in a critical mood just then.

“Why don’t you stick those flowers in your belt, Aunt Mary?” her nephew asked, as they penetrated the worst of the human jungle, and the preservation of the violets appeared to be the main question of the day.  “That’s what the girls do.”

His aunt looked vaguely down at herself.  She had no belt to stick her violets in.  She wore no belt.  She wore a basque.  A basque is a beltless something that you can’t remember, but that females did, once upon a time, cover the upper half of their forms with.  Basques buttoned down the front with ten to thirty buttons, and may be studied at leisure in any good collection of daguerreotypes.  Ladies like Aunt Mary are apt to scorn such futilities as waning styles after they pass beyond a certain age, and for that reason there was no place for Jack’s violets.

“Never mind,” he said cheerfully, having followed her dubiousness with his understanding.  “Just hang on to them a minute longer, and we’ll be out of all this.”