She kept glancing at the girls as if she would like to be acquainted with them, and finally Azalea motioned for her to come over to their seat. The little girl got up at the first crook of Azalea’s finger and crossed the aisle, smiling and coloring as she came. “You don’t like sitting all alone very well, do you?” Azalea asked. “I think it’s horrid traveling in the cars with no one to talk to. Don’t you think I’m lucky to have my friend with me?” “Yes’m,” said the little girl in a very sweet voice. Then after a pause: “I couldn’t bring any of my friends with me.” She seemed to think she would have been the one to do the “bringing.” It evidently did not occur to her that she would have been “brought.” “I’ll turn over this seat if you like,” said Azalea, “and then you may sit with us. Mayn’t she, Carin?” “Why, of course,” said Carin. She got up to turn over the seat, but it stuck and rocked and acted in a singularly perverse way, as car seats sometimes will, and at that a lad who had been sitting with his nose buried in a book, arose and came quickly to her assistance. He was so slender and graceful, his dark eyes were so friendly and quick to make responses, that the girls and Miss Zillah could not help staring at him for a few seconds with surprise and admiration in their eyes. In America lads and young men often have a way of looking like grown men before their time. They are too business-like, too responsible, too seasoned. But this boy was as eager, as gentle as the girls themselves. He not only had not grown up—though he was as tall as the majority of men—but he looked as if he had no intention of doing so for some time to come. He held his cap in his hand, and showed a beautifully shaped head overgrown by a short crop of dark curls which he had, apparently, tried in vain to straighten. “That seat,” he said with a sudden smile, showing two rows of teeth that could be described in no other way save as “gleaming,” “has a bad disposition.” “Yes, hasn’t it?” said Carin. “But I’m sorry to have troubled you.” “It’s no trouble,” he said, “for me to shake the cussedness out of anything that acts like that. It’s a pleasure.” He gave the seat such a shake as irritable parents give to naughty children, and got it over in place somehow, and he settled the little girl in it. “Have you anything that you’d like to have brought over here, Miss Rowantree?” he asked. “Please,” said the little girl, “my dolly and my package.” She spoke with a fine distinctness and with a charming accent. “She’s English, I’m sure,” whispered Carin to Azalea. The doll, a battered but evidently well-loved affair, was brought, and a box held in a shawl strap, which no doubt contained the small person’s wearing apparel.