“Oh!  Poor dollie!” exclaimed Anne to herself.  “I do wish uncle—­” she caught a fleeting glimpse of him beside the workman with the canvas bag—­“if just he hadn’t hurried so.  How could I forget Rosy Posy?  I wish that fat girl would let me hold her baby doll.  She’s just dragging it along.”

Presently the Stout family, as Anne called it to herself, came sauntering along the deck near her.  She started forward, wishing to beg leave to set the fallen doll to rights, and then stopped short, too shy to speak to the strange girl.

A lean, sour-faced man in black bumped against her.  “What an awkward child!” he said crossly.

Anne reddened and retreated to the railing.  Feeling all at once very small and lonely, she searched the dock for her uncle but he was nowhere to be seen.

Then a bell rang.  People hurried up the gang-plank.  Last of all was a workman in blue overalls, with a soft hat jammed over his eyes.  Orders were shouted.  The gang-plank was drawn in.  Then the Caronia wakened up, churned the brown water into foam, crept from the dock, picked her way among the river vessels, and sped on her ocean voyage.

CHAPTER II

It was eight o’clock and a crisp, clear morning.  A stewardess was offering tea and toast to Mrs. Patterson, the frail little lady whom Anne had observed in a wheel-chair the afternoon before.  Seen closely, her face had a pathetic prettiness.  With the delicate color in her soft cheeks, she looked like a fading tea rose.  Yet one knew at a glance that she and bird-like Miss Sarah Drayton were sisters.  There was the same oval face—­this hollowed and that plump; the same soft brown hair—­this wavy and that sleek; the same wide-open hazel eyes—­these soft and sombre, those bright as beads.

“If you drink a few spoonfuls, dear, you may feel more like eating,” Miss Drayton’s cheery voice was saying.  “And do taste the toast.  If it’s as good as it looks, you’ll devour the last morsel.”

Mrs. Patterson sipped the tea and nibbled a piece of toast.  “It lacks only one thing—­an appetite,” she announced, smiling at her sister as she pushed aside the tray.  “Did you hear that?  I thought I heard—­is it a child crying?”

The stewardess started.  “Gracious!  I forgot her!  A little girl’s just across from you, ma’am—­an orphant, I guess.  She’s travelling alone with her uncle.  And he charged me express when he came on board to look after her.  Of course I forgot.  My hands are that full my head won’t hold it.  It’s ‘Vaughan here’ and it’s ‘Vaughan there,’ regular as clockwork.  Why ain’t he called on me again?”

She trotted out and tapped on the door of the stateroom opposite.  There was a brief silence.  Vaughan was about to knock again when the door opened slowly.  There stood a slim little girl struggling for self-control, but her fright and misery were too much for her, and in spite of herself tears trickled down her cheeks.