They had just taken their seats, and the train was in motion, when a heated headlong boy came dashing over the platform, and clung to the door of the carriage, standing on the step.  It was Johnny.  Orlando Hughes, who was next the window, grasped his hands, and, in answer to the cries of dismay and blame that greeted him, he called out, “Yes, here I am; Rob and Joe couldn’t run so fast.”

“Then you’ve got leave?” asked his aunt.

Johnny’s grin said “No.”

She looked up at Mr. Ogilvie in much vexation and anxiety.

“Don’t say any more to him now.  It might put him in great danger.  Wait till the next station,” he said.

It was a stopping train, and ten minutes brought a halt, when the guard came up in a fury, and Johnny found no sympathy for his bold attempt.  Carey had no notion of fostering flat disobedience, and she told Johnny that unless he would promise to go home by himself and beg his father’s pardon, she should stay behind and go back with him, for she could have no pleasure in an expedition with him when he was behaving so outrageously.

The boy looked both surprised and abashed.  His affection for his aunt was very great, as for one who had opened to him the gates of a new world, both within himself and beyond himself.  He would not hear of her giving up the expedition, and promised her with all his heart to walk home, and confess, “Though ’twasn’t papa, but mamma!” were his last words, as they left him on the platform, crestfallen, but with a twinkle in his eye, and with the station-master keeping watch over him as a dangerous subject.

Mr. Ogilvie said it would do the boy good for life; Caroline mourned over him a little, and wondered how his mother would treat him; and Mary sat and thought till the arrival at their destination, when they had to walk to the castle, dragging their appurtenances, and then to rouse their energies to spread out the luncheon.

Then, when there had been the usual amount of mirth, mischief, and mishap, and the party had dispersed, some to sketch, some to scramble, some to botanize, the “Duck and Drake to spoon,"-—as said the boys, Mary Ogilvie found a turfy nook where she could hold council with Mrs. Acton about their poor little friend, for whose welfare she was seriously uneasy.

But Clara did not sympathise as much as she expected, having been much galled by Mrs. Robert Brownlow’s supercilious manner, and thinking the attempt to conciliate her both unworthy and useless.

“Of course I do not mean that poor Carey should truckle to her,” said Mary, rather nettled at the implication; “but I don’t think these irregular hours, and all this roaming about the country at all times, can be well in themselves for her or the children.”