"Three? You can't count. There were four passengers--two men, one woman, and a dog. There! fifty cents, please!" The last wheelbarrow, trundled by a sturdy Irish lad, had in it a clothes-basket with a blue-check apron tied neatly over it. "Look out there, Moike!" cried the stewardess, springing to the side of the basket and steadying it across the narrow gangway. "Don't ye drop me table linen or--ye might git dropped yeself--see?" She said it with a saucy air and leaned toward him threatening a friendly cuff which he dodged while the man in front looked back and laughed good humoredly. "Give it to him!" he said. "She just wants to flirt with him," said Harcourt. "That's the way you all make fools of us. Well, I don't suppose they have much to enliven their days." As he said, it was not much time that Norah had with her sweetheart that day, but it was enough. As the cable was pulled in she called out gayly, "Put them clothes in the warehouse, Moike, till the wash-lady comes. She'll be there 'gin two o'clock." The woman in the blue calico was toiling up the dusty street. She had not waited to see the unloading. As the boat headed up-stream Bess started up. "I _must_ go and see about Margaret. I feel too mean for anything!" "Wait just a minute and see these islands. Aren't they pretty?" They were indeed, and of assorted sizes,--some, tiny disks of green--some, larger, with low grassy banks extending out from the copse like a green fringe--and beyond, the wooded shores of St. Joseph which looked as if it might be the mainland. But Bess would not stay to see. She was not gone long. When she came back she looked cautiously around and went close up to him. "Margaret is gone!" CHAPTER XX SELF-CHAPERONED "Gone! Gone where?" "Don't talk so loud. She got off at Detour, and is going back to Mackinac on the down boat this afternoon." "Why, how could she have got off at Detour?" he asked incredulously. "We saw every living soul that left the boat. There was only one woman." "And that one was Margaret--the one in the blue calico." "Well, I'll be--jiggered!" he said, most inelegantly. "We are two babes in the woods, aren't we? I hope Smeltzer will be as dead easy. And, by Jove! I think he was for I saw him standing right by that gangway as she went off!" "_Don't_ talk so loud!" They went then up into the bow beyond the chance of being overheard, and he asked breathlessly, "Where is Philip? and why did she leave him?" "Leave him? Why, she wouldn't leave Philip any more than she would leave an arm. He went with her." "Do you mean to tell me," he said severely, "that Philip too walked off before our very eyes and we didn't know it? I suppose he went as the dog?" "Do you remember what was in that last wheelbarrow?" "No. Wait! let me think. Was that the one with the clothes-basket in it that the stewardess helped the man off with? She said it was her table linen."