Elizabeth gave him a black look. "You like Blair better 'an me,"
she said, the tears hot in her amber eyes. A minute later she
slipped away to hide under the bed in her own room, peering out
from under a lifted valance for a hoped-for pursuer. But no one
came; the other three were so excited that her absence was hardly
noticed.

How they started, the adventurous ones, late that afternoon--
later, in fact, than they planned, because Blair insisted upon
running back to give Harris a parting gift of a dollar; "'Cause,
poor Harris! _he_ can't go traveling"--how they waited in
the big, barn-like, foggy station for what Blair called the "next
train," how they boarded it for "any place"--all seemed very
funny when they were old enough to look back upon it. It even
seemed funny, a day or two afterward, to their alarmed elders.
But at the time it was not amusing to anybody. David was gloomy
at being obliged to marry Nannie; "I pretty near wish I'd stayed
with Elizabeth," he said, crossly. Nannie was frightened,
because, she declared, "Mamma'll be mad;--now I tell you, Blair,
she'll be mad!" And Blair was sulky because he had no wife. Yet,
in spite of these varying emotions, pushed by Blair's resolution,
they really did venture forth to "travel all around the world!"

As for the grown people's feelings about the elopement, they ran
the gamut from panic to amusement.... At a little after five
o'clock, Miss White heard sobbing in Elizabeth's room, and going
in, found the little girl blacking her boots and crying
furiously. "Elizabeth! my lamb! What is the matter?"

"I have a great many sorrows," said Elizabeth, with a hiccup of