[Illustration:  “HE STEPPED ASIDE TO LET THE GREAT CREATURE PAST HIM”]

He understood the caress, if not the words, for he reached up to touch her cheek with his tongue, and wagged his tail as if he were welcoming a long-lost friend.  Just then Mrs. Sherman stepped out of the elevator.  “Good-bye, Hero,” said the Little Colonel.  “I must go now, but I hope I’ll see you when I come back.”  Nodding good-bye to the Major, she followed her mother out to the street, where her father stood waiting beside an open carriage.

Lloyd enjoyed the drive that morning as they spun along beside the river, up and down the strange streets with the queer foreign signs over the shop doors.  Once, as they drove along the quay, they met the Major and the dog, and in response to a courtly bow, the Little Colonel waved her hand and smiled.  The empty sleeve recalled her grandfather, and gave her a friendly feeling for the old soldier.  She looked back at Hero as long as she could see a glimpse of his white and yellow curls.

It was nearly noon when they stopped at a place where Mrs. Sherman wanted to leave an enamelled belt-buckle to be repaired.  Lloyd was not interested in the show-cases, and could not understand the conversation her father and mother were having with the shopkeeper about enamelling.  So, saying that she would go out and sit in the carriage until they were ready to come, she slipped away.

She liked to watch the stir of the streets.  It was interesting to guess what the foreign signs meant, and to listen to the strange speech around her.  Besides, there was a band playing somewhere down the street, and children were tugging at their nurses’ hands to hurry them along.  Some carried dolls dressed in the quaint costumes of Swiss peasants, and some had balloons.  A man with a bunch of them like a cluster of great red bubbles had just sold out on the corner.

So she sat in the sunshine, looking around her with eager, interested eyes.  The coachman, high up on his box, seemed as interested as herself; at least, he sat up very straight and stiff.  But it was only his back that Lloyd saw.  He had been at a fete the night before.  There seems to be always a holiday in Geneva.  He had stayed long at the merrymaking and had taken many mugs of beer.  They made him drowsy and stupid.  The American gentleman and his wife stayed long in the enameller’s shop.  He could scarcely keep his eyes open.  Presently, although he never moved a muscle of his back and sat up stiff and straight as a poker, he was sound asleep, and the reins in his grasp slipped lower and lower and lower.

The horse was an old one, stiffened and jaded by much hard travel, but it had been a mettlesome one in its younger days, with the recollection of many exciting adventures.  Now, although it seemed half asleep, dreaming, maybe, of the many jaunts it had taken with other American tourists, or wondering if it were not time for it to have its noonday nosebag, it was really keeping one eye open, nervously watching some painters on the sidewalk.  They were putting up a scaffold against a building, in order that they might paint the cornice.