It seemed as though everyone wanted to do something for Selina as the time drew near. Marcus stopped by one morning about a week before she was to go. He had added a carelessly floating tie to his make-up of cape and old hat, and his manner was even more easily negligent.

"Tell Uncle Robert not to do anything about a ticket for you, Selina. The matter's as good as settled and I stopped to tell you I have a pass for you."

This was news so astounding that Mamma on hearing it, lost her head. "Then we will get that piece of white opera cloth, Ann Eliza, and make her the evening cape she needs so badly. There'll be money enough for it now."

Selina had not forgotten a certain extravagance she longed for. "And those ankle-strap slippers, Mamma, may I have them?"

Maud brought her a letter portfolio, Juliette a little crÊpe scarf, Adele a case for photographs and Amanthus the dearest bangle for her bracelet, if she'd owned a bracelet. Amanthus didn't always remember things. The four came in a body with their gifts and stood about amid the litter of preparation and packing, with embarrassment, almost with wistfulness.

At last Maud broke forth. Judy and Adele flushed as she spoke and Amanthus looked disturbed, but they evidently all stood with her in what she said. "We've been talking about you, Selina. It's as if we still need you and you no longer need us. And watching you, we can see you're different in other ways. You've been giving in, just as you've always given in more than any of us, letting your mother get you the clothes she wants you to have rather than what you want, and pack your trunk when we know how you want to pack it yourself. You're just the same in this way seemingly, but in reality you're not the same at all. You know now that you want your own way about the clothes, and you know you want to pack your trunk. You've been slower coming to it than any of the rest of us, except Amanthus, who hasn't any idea what I'm talking about now, and probably never will have. Her mother or her husband or somebody'll always pack her trunks and she'll thank them beautifully and sweetly and mean it. But you know now you want to do it all for yourself, and it makes you different. And we've had to decide you don't need us, because you've made all your plans and arrived at your decisions without us?"

Selina looked from one to the other of them. Was it so? Did she not need them as in the past? She did not know herself. Certainly it was true that she passionately did want to pack her own trunk! How did they guess? What could she say to them? She embraced them all in turn, and kissed them tenderly.

Mr. Tate came round a full day too soon in his dates with roses for her to take on the journey, and Mr. Cannon brought her all the latest magazines. Mr. Welling came with a volume of what he explained were Dobsons by that fellow Austin. Mr. Welling was a wag.

"I'm sorry none of us have been able to qualify, Miss Selina, and this has to be the best I can do for you. There are rondeaux in it, I can vouch for that for I've looked to see, and I'm suspicious there are dittoes. But unfortunately there are not batteaux which would mean more in a place like Florida. But then, of course, you'll have Miss Tippecanoe," by which name he invariably spoke of Miss Pocahontas.

A dearth in news, or indeed in communication of any sort from Miss Diana, began to prove worrying as the day before leaving arrived, and a telegram was sent to Miss Pocahontas for reassurance.

By night her reply came:

Have wired Miss Talbot, and had answer. Expected on original date.

Miss Boswell and Miss 'Hontas were to leave Eadston in the late afternoon. Selina was to start in the early evening and meet them at one o'clock that night at the junction where she would board their train.

This very day, Selina's trunk locked and her satchel ready, Aunt Juanita stopped by with a message. It was a mercy she remembered to deliver it.

"Marcus finds he is not going to get that pass; he asked me yesterday to let you know. He put off his application until too late, but he says he can arrange for a lower rate, and to tell Robert it will be about half. And he does hope, Selina, you are going to be self-reliant and not make too many demands on Pocahontas, who is a sacrifice to her aunt and her aunt's asthma now."

Selina sat up straight and indignant. She really liked that. And from Marcus who had insisted on her going!

Her mother began to worry as soon as Aunt Juanita left. "I'm sorry now I took any of that money from you your father gave you this morning for yourself, and paid the bill for your cape while I was down street, Selina, but your father has been so bothered to get as much together, we won't mention it to him. It isn't as if you wouldn't shortly be earning money for yourself."

Cousin Anna came by here. "Willoughby wanted me to give you some money for a present outright, Selina. But I said no—that fifty dollars is a good deal for you to feel free to spend. I am putting that much in your hands, however. I have it here with me now, for you to hold in case of any emergency. Giving it to you with such an understanding we'll know you have funds if need arises."

Everybody went to the train in the evening, Mamma, Auntie, Papa, the girls, Culpepper, Mr. Cannon, Mr. Welling, Bliss, Algy even, and Tommy Bacon. Papa had seen Marcus late in the afternoon who said he would meet them at the station with the ticket as he was having a little trouble getting it fixed up and that he wanted to see Selina off anyhow.

Five minutes before train time, with Selina's trunk waiting to be checked and everybody agitated since it was known that Marcus was to bring the ticket, there came, not this person at all, but a messenger boy with an envelope, calling Wistar as he came through the gate, a privilege which everybody enjoyed comfortably and at will in those days.

Well, it was here at any rate, the ticket, and Papa, his face dark with suppressed rage, jerked out, not a ticket at all, but a scribbled line from Marcus which Selina caught as her father flung it from him, and read at a hurried glance while he in a quick undertone asked for her purse to supplement his.

Cheaper rates out of the question. They tell me the regular tickets are on sale at the station.

While her father was gone to see about ticket and baggage, everybody else boarded the train with Selina, only to be hustled off almost immediately by the porter. Her kisses to Mamma and Auntie even were curtailed. She hurried with them as far as the rear platform of her coach, and stood looking at them grouped below, a somewhat bereft young figure had she but known it, up there alone, pale and startled now the actual moment of going was come. And she looked pretty, too, in her new skirt and jacket of blue, with her traveling veil, also new, flung back; quite too pretty and visibly inexperienced to be starting off alone.

"That change at the junction by herself in the middle of the night, I don't like it," insisted Mrs. Wistar down on the platform.

Auntie, when deeply moved, became cross. "What's the use bringing that up now?" she demanded tartly. "You've known about it all along."

"The train's off and where's the ticket?" cried Maud.

"Oh, where?" from Juliette and Adele.

Selina's father running down the platform here and swinging up the step to her with ticket and trunk check in his hand as the train began to move, met Culpepper swinging up by the steps from the other side. There was a look of determination on the older man's face. It was evident that at this last moment he didn't like the idea of that change for her at the junction either.

"You needn't," said Culpepper tersely, taking the ticket and check from him. "My mind has been made up all the time, I am."

"On the contrary, I——"

"Cousin Robert!"

The eyes of the two met. "Exactly," said the younger, "now will you let me go? Reassure ole Miss and her mother. She has to sign that ticket somewhere, doesn't she?"

And Culpepper helped his Cousin Robert swing off the now briskly moving train, and he and Selina saw him go back along the platform and join the others.

At 1:45 Culpepper put Selina, ticket, satchel, umbrella, candy-box, roses, magazine and lunch basket, into the actual hands of Miss Pocahontas Boswell, up and at the steps of the sleeper to receive her.

"She's the only thing in the way of a Selina, such as it is, we've got, you know," he remarked cheerfully.

"I know, and I'll see she is returned to you such as I take her, except my own part in her which I propose holding," said Miss Pocahontas smiling, too. "When do you get a train back?"

"Four in the morning," from Culpepper genially.

"He brought me here to the junction to you," Selina told Miss Pocahontas in the dressing-room a bit later as that dear person assisted her to get ready for her berth, "and took every sort of care of me. But he was blunt. He wouldn't even talk."

"Why not?" from Miss 'Hontas, plaiting Selina's heavy flaxen hair.

"He didn't want me to want to come so much," said Selina, neither very lucidly nor elegantly, she felt.