Inside the bag there was a tin biscuit-box, the contents of which, when spread out on the table, made quite a tempting-looking lunch. There were chicken and tongue sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, covered jam puffs, grapes, raisins, and almonds, and a bottle of delicious home-made lemonade.
In her determination that Miss Margaret's holiday should begin pleasantly with a good luncheon on the journey, Lizzie had put up enough for two persons at least.
"Perhaps," said Margaret gleefully, when she had persuaded Eleanor to abandon her buns and to share this sumptuous meal, "she knew that I should meet a friend. Do you know," she added, "that this is the very first picnic I have ever attended in my life, though I have read of them, of course, in books."
A picnic! Eleanor was conscious of a sudden feeling of pity for her newly made acquaintance. She called this meal, partaken of in the dusty, dingy little waiting-room of a noisy junction in company with a girl whom an hour ago she had never met, a picnic.
Memories of gay, delightful river picnics, of mountain picnics, of picnics in ruined castles shared with numerous boy and girl friends flashed through Eleanor's mind. And this girl whose lot she had found it in her heart to envy a short time back had known none of these things.
"And had I not met you," Margaret was saying confidingly when Eleanor came out of the sombre mood into which she had suddenly fallen, "I should never have had the courage even to open my lunch, at least I could not have eaten it in a railway carriage with every one staring at me. Could you have eaten your lunch under such circumstances?"
"Oh, yes, I think I could," Eleanor returned with some amusement.
Probably their ages were very much the same, but what a child Margaret was compared to her! To make up for that, however, she certainly used much longer words.
"How did your grandfather come to allow you to travel alone?" she asked suddenly. "From what you have told me about him I should have thought it was the very last thing he should have allowed you to do."
"He was very reluctant to give me permission to travel without an escort," Margaret answered, "but he was unable to avoid doing so." And then she related how the housekeeper who was to have brought her had broken her leg, and how a sudden epidemic of scarlet fever in the village had made it advisable for her departure not to be delayed.