The Key Note: A Novel
descended the steps and wandered away.

When, the next day in town, Philip stood in the Union Station waiting for Veronica's train, he wondered how he was to know her, but remembering that Miss Burridge spoke of having instructed her to go the first thing to the transfer office about her trunk, he turned his steps thither as the crowds poured off the train. All Boston seemed to have decided to come to Maine for the summer.

Soon he saw her—he felt at once it was she—looking about undecidedly as she came. She was a short, plump girl of [Pg 27]seventeen or eighteen, at present bent a little sideways from the weight of the suitcase she was carrying. Philip strode forward and seized the suitcase with one hand while he lifted his hat with the other.

[Pg 27]

"Here, you let that alone!" said the girl decidedly, her round eyes snapping.

"Isn't this Miss Trueman?"

"Why, yes, it is," she returned, but she still looked suspicious and clung to her suitcase. Nobody need think she wasn't up to all the tricks. "Did my aunt send you to meet me?"

"She certainly did."

"Then you know her name. What's her name?" The upward look was so childlike in its shrewdness that it stirred the spirit of mischief.

"Why—let me see, Lucilla, isn't it?"

"You give me that suitcase this minute." The girl pulled on the handle with a muscular little hand.

"Why, Veronica," Philip's smile became a laugh. "Santa Veronica, what a very unsaintlike voice and expression you're using."

She laughed, too, then, and relinquished her burden. "You do know me. Who are you?"

"Miss Burridge's man-of-all-work. Name, Philip Barrison."

[Pg 28]

[Pg 28]

"So she gave you such a job as this. How did you pick me out?"


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