picked up.  Ugh!  How he’d hate to trot along in that blue-frocked line!  “I’m a dawdling idiot,” he said irritatedly to himself.  “What am I worrying about?  I’ve done the sensible thing, the only possible thing.  Her own people deserted her.  I’ve secured her a decent home and honest training.  Whew!  It’s later than I thought.  I’ll have to rush to make that four-ten train.”

An hour later, having given hurried explanations to Anne and started her off in a cab, he was on a north-bound train.

And Anne?

The bewildered child gathered only one fact from his speech.  She was not going to Miss Drayton, as she had expected—­dear Miss Drayton, to whom she longed to pour forth her secret.  Instead, she was going to strangers—­people, Mr. Patterson said, who took care of little girls that had no fathers and mothers.

She hugged Honey-Sweet tight in her arms and walked up the steps of the square brown house.

If you have never seen the ‘Home for Girls,’ you will wish me to describe Anne’s new abode.  Let me see.  I have said that the house was square and brown, haven’t I? with many green-shuttered windows.  The grounds were large and well-kept—­almost too spick and span, for one expects twenty-six children to leave behind them such marks of good times as paper dolls and picture-books, croquet-mallets and tennis balls on trampled turf.

The brick walk led straight between rows of neatly-clipped box to the front door.  In the grass plot on the right, there was a circle of scarlet geraniums and on the left there was a circle of scarlet verbenas.  On one side of the porch, there was a neatly-trimmed rose-bush with straggling yellow blossoms, and on the other side there was a white rose-bush.

The front door was open.  Anne saw a long, narrow hall with whitewashed walls and a bare, clean floor.  A curtain which screened the back of the hall fluttered in the breeze, and disclosed a long rack holding twenty-six pairs of overshoes, and above them, each on its own hook, twenty-six straw hats.  Anne counted them while she waited and her heart sank—­why, she could not have told.  She knew that no matter how long she might live, she would never, never, never want a broad-brimmed straw hat with a blue ribbon round it.  A subdued clatter of knives and forks came from a room at the back.  Anne reflected that this place seemed more like a boarding-school than a home.  How odd it was to have a sign over the door saying that it was a ‘Home’!  And ‘for Girls.’  How did the people choose that their children were to be just girls?

While she was thinking these things, the cabman put her trunk down on the porch, rang the bell, and stamped down the steps.  No use waiting here for a fee.  A door at the back of the hall opened, and there came forward a girl with a scrubbed-looking face and a blue-and-white gingham apron over a blue cotton frock.  She fixed her round china-blue eyes on Anne, and waited for her to speak.