As for me, Page Allison, I was just a girl, neither beautiful nor ugly, brilliant nor stupid; but I was still as determined as I had been on that morning in September when I started out from Bracken for boarding school, not to rest until I had made a million friends. I had made a pretty good start and I intended to keep it up.
"Well, we are glad to see you!" exclaimed Zebedee, shaking hands with both girls at once as he met them on the gangway. "I hope your father is well, Miss Annie, and is favourably considering joining us for a week end at Willoughby."
"I don't know, Mr. Tucker, what he will do," answered Annie, smiling; "he enjoyed seeing you so much that I shall not be astonished if he takes you at your word and comes to visit you."
That was the most wonderful conquest ever made! Zebedee had been down to Price's Landing and deliberately captivated the stiff, unbending Englishman, Mr. Arthur Ponsonby Pore. I asked him to tell me about it and he answered quite simply in the words of Cæsar: "'Veni! Vidi! Vici!' Why, Page, the man is peculiar but he is more lonesome than anything else. All I did was to treat him like a human being and take for granted he would treat me the same way, and sure enough he did. And here is poor little Annie, to show the wisdom of taking it for granted that a man is going to be kind. I asked him to let her come to the house party as though he would of course be delighted to give his daughter this pleasure, and he complied with the greatest cordiality."
After seeing to the girls' trunks and transferring them to the baggage trolley for Willoughby Beach (and this time Annie, having a neat, new little trunk which she called a "box," was not embarrassed by the bulging telescope she had taken to Gresham), we then went to the station to await the arrival of the precious cook.
"Well, if it would mean more of Page's batter bread, I shan't mind much," declared Zebedee as the train puffed in.
"Look for a girl with a red bow on her shoulder," said I, peering at every passenger who got out of the coloured coach. There were many as there was an excursion to Ocean View and a picnic given by "The Sons and Daughters of the Morning." The dusky crowd swarmed by, laden with boxes and baskets of lunch, all of them laughing and happy and any of them looking as though she might be a good cook, but not one of them was Blanche. Red there was in abundance but never in the form of a bow on the left shoulder. Red hats, red cravats, red parasols passed us by, and even a stair-steps row of six little nigs in rough-dry white dresses with all of their pigtails tightly "wropped" with red string and a big red bow of ten-cent store ribbon on top of each happy, woolly head,--and still no Blanche.