The fact that the two little girls were going to the same town was the finishing link in the chain of friendship that they had forged so rapidly. They talked that evening about their schools, and their games, and the books they had read until Miss Fisher and Caroline’s own sense of propriety plucked them apart. In the morning they began where they had left off, while Miss Fisher, who was quite exhausted, after a car-sick night, remained aloof and shook her head in utter helplessness.

Now Miss Fisher’s car-sickness has a great deal to do with the story. She was honestly feeling that she could not endure another hour in the train, when she received a telegram at Albany. Friends of hers, whom she had not seen in months, a nice girl and her even nicer brother (so Miss Fisher thought), wired that they would meet her at the train in Pittsfield and whisk her away for a blissful week-end in the Berkshires before she went on to her aunt’s house in Boston. For an instant Miss Fisher thought of duty and the tiresome, unruly child she had agreed to chaperon. Then she thought of the deadly hours in the train, and the nice girl’s even nicer brother.

Miss Fisher lurched out into the car and captured Jacqueline. To Jacqueline she explained that she had to leave the train at Pittsfield, and that Jacqueline would remain in the care of the conductor and the porter till she reached Baring Junction, where those officials would deliver her to her great-aunt. Jacqueline was of course to be a very good girl.

“Sure!” promised Jacqueline—too readily, a suspicious person might have thought.

But Miss Fisher was too fluttered with her own affairs to be suspicious. She tripped gayly off the train at Pittsfield, into the arms of her friends, and out of this story. Of course her conduct was quite blameworthy, and so Jacqueline’s Aunt Edie and several other people said later. Just the same Jacqueline should not have called her a fish, and certainly not a piece of cheese.

The moment Miss Fisher’s rumpled blue linen skirt had vanished from the car, Jacqueline laid hold of Caroline’s suitcase and, like a valorous small ant with a huge crumb, tugged it into the drawing-room. Caroline snatched up her hat and her sweater, and with Mildred in her arms followed after protesting.

“You come along,” Jacqueline over-rode her protests. “We can sprawl all we want to in here, and people won’t stop to stare at Mildred, and ask us our names, and do we like to travel. Wouldn’t they be peeved if we asked them questions like that, without being introduced?”

So Caroline and Jacqueline and Mildred settled down to enjoy the privacy and comfort of the drawing-room, without the disadvantages of Miss Fisher’s presence. But somehow they didn’t enjoy themselves much. For they couldn’t forget—that is, Caroline and Jacqueline couldn’t, for I don’t know about Mildred—that the pretty little gold watch on Jacqueline’s wrist, with its madly racing minute-hand, was tearing away the hours, so very few now, before the train reached Baring Junction.

“I’m going to have a rotten summer,” complained Jacqueline. “Oh, I wish I’d made Aunt Edie let me go to a camp! Great-aunt Eunice is as old as the hills and Cousin Penelope is most as old. It will be poky at their house, and I can’t do this, or Aunt Eunice will be scared, and I can’t do that, or Cousin Penelope will scold. Oh, shivering chimpanzees! I wish I’d gone to camp!”

But poor little Caroline had no words for the misery that possessed her, as the minutes ran by and the hour came nearer that should deliver her into the hands of grudging strangers.

“I—I hope half-aunt Martha’s boys aren’t big,” she confided to Jacqueline. “I—I’m afraid of boys.”

“I’m not,” said Jacqueline. “I’d rather face fifteen boys than one old piano.”

“And I hope they don’t make me pitch hay or drive cows—I’m scared of cows,” quavered Caroline.

“I’d rather drive a million cows than have to be starched up and on my good behavior with a pack of tiresome aunts,” Jacqueline returned gloomily.

“Oh!” Caroline was goaded into crying. “If only you were me, and I were you!”

Jacqueline snorted derision. What’s the use of wishing? Then her gaze wandered to the helter-skelter heap of her belongings on the couch—hat-box, vanity bag, coat, suitcase, books!

Books! Her eyes fell on the gay jacket of “The Prince and the Pauper.”

Suddenly she grasped Caroline’s arm so hard that Caroline squeaked: “Ow!”

“Don’t stop to ow!” bade Jacqueline. “Because if you’ve got your nerve with you, I’ve got the dandiest plan so you can have a piano this summer, and no babies to tend, and no boys, nor nothing.”

Caroline merely stared and held Mildred tight. She really feared that the heat of the day had affected Jacqueline’s head.

“Your bossy old half-aunt has never seen you,” went on Jacqueline, “and my Gildersleeve relations haven’t seen me since I was three years old.”

“Yes,” nodded Caroline. That much she thought it safe to grant.

“They’re each of them expecting a little girl most eleven years old, with brown hair and eyes, and her hair bobbed.”

“Yes,” Caroline freely admitted.

“Well, then!” Jacqueline concluded triumphantly. “Suppose we go and change clothes, like Prince Edward and Tom Canty in ‘The Prince and the Pauper,’ and you say you’re me, and I say I’m you,—and who’s to know the difference?”