“I’ll have some supper, too, if I may, Cousin Kate,” he added, with his cheerful grin at sight of the array of food under which the table groaned. “Then I’ll go to see Mrs. Haven—she’s only a block or two from here—and give her the captain’s message.” “Oh, Tommy, let me walk around with you!” Erica pleaded. “You can bring me back to the steps. We’ll walk fast to make up time.” To this Tommy agreed, and when the meal was over and a second round of farewells said all over again, Erica followed him out to the hall. Here, out of sight of Mrs. Folger and Cousin Kate, Tommy produced an awkwardly wrapped bundle from a chair where it had been hidden from view by his heavy seacoat. “Rick, I brought back that extra suit mother insisted on my taking,” he said, hurriedly. “It’s really too small for me now, and, anyhow, I haven’t room for a lot of shore clothes that I shan’t need. You saw for yourself what a little bit of a cubbyhole I have to sleep and keep my things in. I’ve got one good suit already for going ashore. Don’t show this to mother till I get off in the morning, and then just explain I don’t need it.” “All right. I’ll take it upstairs to my room,” Erica assented. “I’ll only be a moment getting my bonnet and cape.” It was scarcely more than a minute when she ran eagerly down the stairs again, wrapped in her woolly red cloak, and the cousins let themselves out the front door into the warm, late April dusk. High up overhead a pale little evening star was winking at them cheerfully over the chimney pots of the houses across the way. The lamp-posts, too, had already sprung into cheerful winking pin-points of light down the street ahead of them, and a general air of peacefulness and hope seemed abroad on the soft evening air. Erica, swinging along briskly at Tommy’s side, felt her courage—which had wilted a bit after supper, when faced by those second, final good-bys—revive sturdily. She slipped her fingers through his arm and spoke hesitantly. “Tommy, somehow—I can’t tell you why, and maybe you’ll only say I’m silly—but I do feel that it’s going to be—all right with Lis, when you get to Canton.” “Well, mostly I feel that way myself,” Tommy responded, gravely. “Seems as if there’s just _got_ to be good news when the _Spray_ arrives. Only——” he turned about suddenly, and Erica saw that the boy’s face was working in a piteous effort not to show his feelings. “Only—suppose there—there isn’t—_anything_?” Erica’s optimism of a moment before died, in a flash, to a sick kind of fear such as, even when Captain Bartlet first told her Lis was missing, she had not known in quite such intensity. To know that Tommy, gay, light-hearted, unimaginative Tommy, felt this way about his quest, on the very eve of his departure, knocked the carefully-built-up supports of Erica’s own belief from under it.