ust the sense the words conveyed,
and she, in her preoccupation with her own anxiety, and her pity for
him, interpreted them aright.

She stayed to add, "I don't know what he could have been on that train
for, any way, do you?"

"No, and he wa'n't on it; you'll find that out."

"It'll be very provoking," she said, forecasting the minor trouble of
the greater trouble's failure. "Everybody will wonder if it isn't
father, and we shall have to tell them it isn't."

"Well, that won't be so bad as havin' to tell 'em it is," said Elbridge,
getting back for the moment to his native dryness.

"That's true," Adeline admitted. "Don't speak to anybody about it till
you hear." She knew from his making no answer that he would obey her,
and she hid the paper in her pocket, as if she would hide the
intelligence it bore from all the rest of the world.

She let Suzette sleep late, after the fatigues of her day in Boston and
the excitement of their talk at night, which she suspected had prevented
the girl from sleeping early. Elbridge's sympathetic incredulity had
comforted her, if it had not convinced her, and she possessed herself in
such patience as she could till the answer should come from the mills.
If her father were there, then it would be all right; and in the
meantime she found some excuses for not believing the worst she feared.
There was no reason in the world why he should be on that train; there
was no reason why she should identify him with that T. W. Northwick in
the burnt-up car; that was not his name, and that was not the place
where he would have been.

XI.

There was trouble with the telegraph and telephone connections between
Hatboro' and Ponkwasset, and Adeline had to go to the funeral without an
answer to Elbridge's message. Below her surface interest in the ceremony
and the behavior of the mourners and the friends, which nothing could
have alienated but the actual presence of calamity, she had a nether
misery of alternating hope and fear, of anxieties continually reasoned
down, and of security lost the instant it was found. The double strain
told so upon her nerves, that when the rites at the grave were ended,
she sent word to the clergyman and piteously begged him to drive home
with her.

"Why, aren't you well, Miss Northwick?" he asked, with a glance at her
troubled face, as he got into the covered sleigh with her.

"Oh, yes," she said, and she flung herself back against the cushioning
and be