All too soon for Anne, came the day that was to take her to the city.  Generous Mrs. Collins insisted on slipping into Miss Dorcas’s trunk a liberal supply of Lizzie’s clothes, and she gave Anne one of Lizzie’s best frocks to travel in and a muslin hat that flopped over her face.  Disguised in these, she was to be smuggled away on a night train to prevent her being discovered and taken back to the asylum.  They were the more concerned about the matter because Mr. Collins heard at the blacksmith shop new inquiries about the lost child.  Miss Dorcas charged Charity and Richard, who trudged the long eight miles to visit their “precious baby child,” not to mention having seen Anne.  Richard brought on his shoulder a great bag full of things “for Marse Will Watkins’s child”—­apples, popcorn, potatoes.  For days Mrs. Collins had been baking cakes and pies and selecting sweetmeats, preserves, and pickles from her store.  The supplies were so liberal that after a barrel was packed and repacked and re-repacked there were almost as many things left out as were put in.  Mrs. Collins wanted to put them in another barrel, but Miss Dorcas said that the supply already packed would more than fill her tiny pantry.

Mrs. Collins consoled herself as best she could.  “Christmas is coming,” she said; “it’s slow but it’s on the way.  And when it do get here, I’ll send you a barrel packed to show you what a barrel can hold.”

The morning after Anne’s regretful farewell to her old home and her new friends, found her eagerly examining her cousin’s small apartment in Georgetown.  The house was a red-brick mansion built for the residence of an early Secretary of the Navy, and now made over into cheap flats.  The stately, old-fashioned place was surrounded by small shops and cheap, dingy houses.  “It makes me think,” Miss Dorcas said with a sigh, “how Jefferson would look to-day in a Democratic party meeting or Hamilton among modern Republican politicians.”

Anne didn’t know who Hamilton was but she thought Jefferson, whose picture hung in the sitting-room, looked as if he might have lived here.  It was a place still full of charm.  In the rear of the mansion was an old-fashioned flower garden with box-bordered gravel walks dividing the formal beds and leading here to a stone seat, there to a broken fountain.  In the centre of the garden, was a sun-dial which a century before told the shining hours; now, its days went in shadow under the crowding trees,—­a coffee-tree from Arabia, a mulberry from Spain, and other relics of the wanderings of the long-ago secretary.  Anne felt like a bird in a nest as she sat on the roomy, white-columned porch overlooking the garden, catching glimpses through a leafy screen of the broad Potomac and the wooded hills of Virginia.

“Ah! when the leaves fall it is beautiful, beautiful,” said her cousin; but Anne was sure that it could never be more beautiful than now, in the green-gold glory of a late summer afternoon.