Page:Anna Chapin--Half a dozen boys.djvu/258

230 when a particularly loud snore from their next neighbor broke the stillness; and at each stopping-place she heard Rob’s curtain fly up, to let him look out on the silent towns.

“Doesn’t our Bess look matronly!” exclaimed Alice Rogers the next morning, when she saw Bess and her two companions coming  towards her. “That one with her must be Fred Allen. Isn’t he stunningly handsome, Jack?”

“Poor little cub!” said Jack sympathetically, as he hurried forward to meet them.

After the first confused moment of greeting and hand-shaking, question and answer, Alice, a plump blonde who still kept much of her girlish beauty, turned to the boys.

“Can this be my little cousin Rob, grown up to this?” she said, as she kissed him, to his secret disgust, for Rob scorned kisses except  from Bess. “And this, I think, is Bessie’s adopted boy, Fred, isn’t it? I am so glad to have you both here, for I like boys almost as well as Bess does.”

Two days later, Rob sat on the piazza at Island Den, painfully fulfilling his promise to