Maria reached round one hand and caught a fold of her skirt.  Her new dress was in fact rather long for her.  Ida had remarked that morning that she would have Miss Keeler shorten it on Saturday.  Ida had no wish to have a grown-up step-daughter quite yet, whom people might take for her own.

The three reached the ferry-boat just as she was about to leave her slip.  They sat down in a row midway of the upper deck.  The heat inside was intense.  Gladys loosened her shabby little sacque.  Maria sat impassible.

“Ain’t you most baked in here?” asked Gladys.

“No,” replied Maria.

Both Gladys and Wollaston looked cowed.  They kept glancing at each other and at Maria.  Maria sat next Gladys, Wollaston on Gladys’s other side.  Gladys nudged Wollaston, and whispered to him.

“We’ve jest got to stick close to her,” she whispered, in an alarmed cadence.  The boy nodded.

Then they both glanced again at Maria, who seemed quite oblivious of their attention.  When they reached the other side, Wollaston, with an effort, asserted himself.

“We had better take a cross-town car to the Sixth Avenue Elevated,” he said, pressing close to Maria’s side and seizing her arm again.

Maria shook her head.  “No,” she said.  “Where Mrs. Edison lives is not so near the Elevated.  It will be better to take a cross-town car and transfer at Seventh Avenue.”

“All right,” said Wollaston.  He led the way in the run down the stairs, and aided his companions onto the cross-town car.  He paid their fares, and got the transfers, and stopped the other car.  He was beginning to feel himself again, at least temporarily.

“Well, I think the police-station is the best place to look, but have your own way.  It won’t take long to see if she is there now,” said Wollaston.  He was hanging on a strap in front of Maria.  The car was crowded with people going to up-town theatres.  Some of the ladies, in showy evening wraps, giving glimpses of delicate waists, looked curiously at the three.  There was something extraordinary about their appearance calculated to attract attention, although it was difficult to say just why.  After they had left the car, a lady with a white lace blouse showing between the folds of a red cloak, said to her escort:  “I wonder who they were?”

“I don’t know,” said the man, who had been watching them.  “I thought there was something unusual.”

“I thought so, too.  That well-dressed young woman, and that handsome boy, and that shabby little girl.”  By the “young woman” she meant Maria.

“Yes, a queer combination,” said the man.

“It wasn’t altogether that, but they looked so desperately in earnest.”

Meantime, while the lights of the car disappeared up the avenue, Maria, Wollaston, and Gladys Mann searched for the house in which had lived Ida Edgham’s cousin.

At last they found it, mounted the steps, and rang the bell.  It was an apartment-house.  After a little the door opened of itself.