Another partition held jelly tarts, with flaky crusts and quivering red centers, and somehow Ellen found room for a few sandwiches, through whose thin bread showed the yellow of mayonnaise. Everything was carefully protected with white paper napkins, and the whole box was a most appetizing display of skilled culinary art. “But it’s so big, Ellen,” repeated Betty, laughing. “I simply can’t carry so much stuff.” “Niver you mind, Miss Betty,” said the imperturbable cook, going on with her work of wrapping the big box in neat brown paper and tying it with stout twine. “You’ve not to walk at all, at all, and ye can get a porther to lift it off the thrain. An’ sure Pat’ll put it on safely fer ye.” So Betty submitted to the inevitable, realizing that she wouldn’t have to carry the box at all, and proceeded to eat her breakfast. “It is an awfully big box,” said Mrs. McGuire, as the carriage came to the door; “but if your party can’t eat all the things, you can give them to some children on the boat.” “Oh, it’ll be all right,” said Betty, and kissing her mother good-by, she jumped into the carriage, and Pat drove her to the train. There were few passengers at that early hour, and so there was ample room for the box on the seat beside her. Though Betty went often to New York, she rarely went alone, but as Dorothy and her aunt’s family were to meet her, she felt no responsibility as to traveling. In Jersey City the conductor lifted the box out for her, and a convenient porter carried it to the ferry-boat. “Hold it level,” Betty admonished him, and he touched his red cap and said “Yes’m,” and then carried the box with greatest care. Betty went by the Twenty-third Street Ferry, and in the ferry-house on the New York side she was to meet Dorothy, “under the clock.” This tryst was a well-known one, for it made a definite place to meet in the crowded room. Betty always enjoyed the long ferry, and she sat outside, with her precious box reposing on the seat beside her. The morning was delightful, but it was growing warm and bade fair to be a very warm day. Betty watched with interest the great steamer piers, and the traffic on the river, rejoicing to think that soon she would be sailing farther up the stream, where the banks were green and wooded, and the expanse of water unmarred by freight-boats and such unpicturesque craft. The ferry-boat bumped into its dock at Twenty-third, Street, and Betty picked up her box and started off with it. A porter met her at the gangplank, and she gave it to him with an injunction to hold it quite level. For it would be a pity to tumble the neat arrangement of Ellen’s goodies into an unappetizing mass. Down-stairs they went, and into the waiting-room, where Betty paused “under the clock.” Dorothy hadn’t arrived, but Betty remembered, with a smile, that she was nearly always late, so, remunerating the porter, she sat down to wait, with her box beside her.