eyes. “My! but what a jolt I must have been to Uncle William!” Billy was thinking.
The next minute she drew nearer the gate and regarded with absorbed attention the long line of passengers already sweeping up the narrow aisle between the cars.
Hurrying men came first, with long strides, and eyes that looked straight ahead. These Billy let pass with a mere glance. The next group showed a sprinkling of women—women whose trig hats and linen collars spelled promptness as well as certainty of aim and accomplishment. To these, also, Billy paid scant attention. Couples came next—the men anxious-eyed, and usually walking two steps ahead of their companions; the women plainly flustered and hurried, and invariably buttoning gloves or gathering up trailing ends of scarfs or boas.
The crowd was thickening fast, now, and Billy's eyes were alert. Children were appearing, and young women walking alone. One of these wore a bunch of violets. Billy gave her a second glance. Then she saw a pink—but it was on the coat lapel of a tall young fellow with a brown beard; so with a slight frown she looked beyond down the line.
Old men came now, and old women; fleshy women, and women with small children and babies. Couples came, too—dawdling couples, plainly newly married: the men were not two steps ahead, and the women's gloves were buttoned and their furs in place.
Gradually the line thinned, and soon there were left only an old man with a cane, and a young woman with three children. Yet nowhere had Billy seen a girl wearing a white carnation, and walking alone.
With a deeper frown on her face Billy turned and looked about her. She thought that somewhere in the crowd she had missed Mary Jane, and that she would find her now, standing near. But there was no one standing near except the good-looking young fellow with the little pointed brown beard, who, as Billy noticed a second time, was wearing a white carnation.
As she glanced toward him, their eyes met. Then, to Billy's unbounded amazement, the man advanced with uplifted hat.
“I beg your pardon, but is not this—Miss Neilson?”
Billy drew back with just a touch of hauteur.
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