as certainly at
hand, so he made haste to the automobile.

Arethusa, after descending from the train with her satchel and purse
still clutched firmly, followed the crowd across the tracks under the
shed, toward the iron gates she had to pass through to reach the
station proper. Her busy grey eyes had failed to find anyone among
those menfolks just around the train who at all resembled her mental
picture of her father. And as she hurried after the crowd, still
watching for him, it seemed to Arethusa that there were more people in
this comparatively small space than she had ever seen in one company
before, in all of her life. So many of them were men, she noted; so
many of them were men with nice faces who might have been the fathers
of travelling daughters they had come to meet.

She felt a sudden and most unexpected bewilderment sweep over her as
she looked about. How would she ever find her father here, among all
these hundreds and hundreds of people? She was carried along,
unresisting in her panic, clear through the gates without being aware
she had passed them, and pushed aside by the impatient throng against
one of the iron pillars that supported the roof of the platform at one
side of the station.

From this point, she could not help but watch all the glad meetings
about her, of sisters and brothers and husbands and wives, and various
other relationships (there were some she was quite positive were
fathers and daughters), and she watched them with something like envy;
for so far as she could tell, everyone who had got off the train had
been immediately seized by some person who seemed superlatively glad to
see him or her. Yes, every human being but Arethusa Worthington seemed
to have been met by somebody.

Then a cold little fear clutched at her heart; suppose.... Suppose....
she had made a mistake and this was not Lewisburg, after all!

But it must be! Had not the brakeman accommodatingly told her so right
in her very own ear? And the Cherrys had been going to Lewisburg, and
they had got off with Arethusa. She was surely in the right station.

The next most natural supposition was that no one had come to meet her.
And then the wildest and most unreasoning terror of this situation,
directly grown from some of those travellers' tales of her aunts'
weaving, overwhelmed Arethusa. She stood closer to the pillar as a sort
of protection.

Such an Ending to the Joyfully Begun Journey!

The Cherry family had been