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I

“Good-bye, Miss Tucker!”

“Good luck, Miss Tommy!”

“Bye, bye, Tomsie!”

“Don’t stay away too long!”

These sentiments were being called from the Hoboken dock to the deck of an ocean steamer, while a young lady, buried in bouquets and bonbons, leaned over the rail, sparkling, inciting, compelling, responding.

“Take care of yourself, Tommy!”

“I don’t see but that I must! Nobody else to do it!” she responded saucily.

“You wouldn’t let ’em if they tried!” This from a rosy-cheeked youngster who was as close to the water’s edge as safety permitted. “Say, did you guess what my floral offering was to be when you trimmed your hat? I am flattered!”

“Sorry! The hat was trimmed weeks ago, and I’m wearing your bouquet because it matches.”

“Thanks, awfully,” replied the crestfallen youth. “Plans for reduction of head-size constantly on file in Miss Tucker’s office.”

“Just Carl’s luck to hit on a match.”

“Don’t see any particular luck in being accessory to a hat trimming,” grumbled Carl.

“Write now and then, Miss Tommy, won’t you?” said a fellow with eyeglasses and an air of fashion.

“Won’t promise! I’ll wait till I’m rich enough to cable!”

“Shilling a word’s expensive, but you can send ’em to me collect. My word is ‘Hopeful,'”–at which the little party laughed.

“Register another, and make it ‘Uncertain,'” called the girl roguishly, seeing that no one was paying any attention to her friends and their nonsense.

“London first, is it?” asked the rosy youth. “Decided on your hotel?”

“Hotel? It’s going to be my share of a modest Bloomsbury lodging,” she answered. “Got to sing my way from a third-floor-back in a side street to a gorgeous suite at the Ritz!”

“We’ll watch you!” cried three in chorus.

“But we’d rather hear you, darling,” said a nice, tailor-made girl, whose puffy eyelids looked as if she had been crying.

“Blessed lamb! I hope I’ll be better worth hearing! Oh, do go home, all of you; especially you, Jessie! My courage is oozing out at the heels of my shoes. Disappear! I’ve been farewelling actively for an hour and casually for a week. If they don’t take off the gangplank in a minute or two I shan’t have pluck enough to stick to the ship.”

“You can’t expect us to brace you up, Tommy,” said the rosy youth. “We’re losing too much by it. Come along back! What’s the matter with America?”

“Don’t talk to her that way, Carl,”–and the tailor-made girl looked at him reproachfully. “You know she’s got nobody and nothing to come back to. She’s given up her room. She’s quarreled with her beastly uncle at last; all her belongings are in the hold of the steamer, and she’s made up her mind.”

“All ashore that’s going ashore!” The clarion tones of the steward rang through the air for the third time, and the loud beating of the ship’s gong showed that the last moment had come. The gangplank was removed and the great liner pushed off and slowly wended her way down-river, some of the more faithful ones in the crowd waving handkerchiefs until she was a blur in the distance.

“Well, there’s no truer way of showing loyalty than by going to Hoboken to see a friend off,” said the eyeglassed chap as he walked beside Jessie Macleod to the ferry. “I wouldn’t do it for anybody but Tommy.”

“Nor I!” exclaimed the rosy youth. “Good old Tommy! I wonder whether she’ll sing and have a career, or fall in love over there?”

“She might do both, I should think; at least it has been done, though not, perhaps, with conspicuous success,” was Carl’s reply.

“Whatever she does, we’ve lost her,” sighed the girl; “and our little set will be so dull without Tommy!”

* * * * *

Fergus Appleton had leaned over the deck rail for a few moments before the ship started on her voyage; leaned there idly and indifferently, as he did most things, smoking his cigarette with an air of complete detachment from the world. He was going to no one, and leaving no one behind. He had money enough to live on, but life had always been something of a bore to him and he could not have endured it without regular occupation. His occasional essays on subjects connected with architecture, his critical articles in similar fields, his travels in search of wider information, the book on which he was working at the moment,–these kept him busy and gave him a sense of being tolerably useful in his generation. The particular group of juveniles shouting more or less intimate remarks to a girl passenger on board the steamer attracted his attention for a moment.