When they reached the city, Horace put the soft, flying locks in as good order as he could, and tied them up in his handkerchief.

“I wisht I hadn’t come,” whined Fly; “I don’t want to wear a hangerfiss; ’tisn’t speckerble!”

“Hush right up!  I’m not going to have you get cold!—­My sorrows!  Shan’t I be thankful when I get where there’s a woman to take care of her?”

On the platform at the depot, aunt Madge, Prudy, and Dotty Dimple, were waiting for them.  A hearty laugh went the rounds, which Fly thought was decidedly silly.  Aunt Madge took the young travellers right into her arms, and hugged them in her own cordial style, as if her heart had been hungry for them for many a day.

“We’re so glad!—­for it did seem as if you’d never come,” exclaimed Dotty Dimple.

“And I’d like to know,” said Horace, “how you happened to get here first.”

“O, we came by express—­came yesterday.”

“By ’spress?” cried Flyaway, pulling away from aunt Madge, who was trying to pin her frock together; “we came by a ’ductor.—­Why, where’s Flipperty’s ticket?”

Horace seized Prudy with one hand, and Dotty Dimple with the other, turning them round and round.

“I don’t see anything of the express mark, ‘Handle with care.’  What has become of it?”

“O, we were done up in brown paper,” said Prudy, laughing, “and the express mark was on that; but aunt Madge took it off as soon as she got the packages home.”

“Why, what a story, Prudy Parlin!  We didn’t have a speck of brown paper round us.  Just cloaks and hats with feathers in!”

Dotty spoke with some irritation.  She had all along been rather sensitive about being sent by express, and could not bear any allusion to the subject.

“There, that’s Miss Dimple herself.  Let me shake hands with your Dimpleship!  Didn’t come to New York to take a joke,—­did you?”

“No, her Dimpleship came to New York to get warm,” said Peacemaker Prudy; “and so did I, too.  You don’t know how cold it is in Maine.”

By this time they were rattling over the stones in their aunt’s elegant carriage.  It was dusk; the lamps were lighted, the streets crowded with people, the shops blazing with gay colors.

“I didn’t come here to get warm, either,” said Dotty, determined to have the last word:  “I was warm enough in Portland.  I s’pose we’ve got a furnace,—­haven’t we?—­and a coal grate, too.”

“I do hope Horace hasnt’t got her started in a contrary fit,” thought Prudy; “I brought her all the way from home without her saying a cross word.”

But aunt Madge had a witch’s broom, to sweep cobwebs out of the sky.  Putting her arm around Dotty, she said,—­

“You all came to bring sunshine into my house; bless your happy hearts.”

That cleared Dotty’s sky, and she put up her lips for a kiss; while Flyaway, with her “hangerfiss” on, danced about the carriage like a fly in a bottle, kissing everybody, and Horace twice over.