airs. I am going to supper now, and shall
turn down the lights. One burner will be sufficient."

"Thank you very much. Where can I find some water?"

"In the cooler in the ladies' dressing-room. It is most unaccountably
hot tonight, and I never knew anything like it in October. There must
be a cyclone brewing somewhere not far off."

He lifted his hat, as he passed her, and disappeared; and the tired
girl seated herself near a window and stirred the dense, impure air by
fanning herself with her straw hat. Gradually the few stragglers
loitering about the station wandered away; the engineer stepped upon
the locomotive; a piercing whistle broke suddenly on the silence
settling down over the whilom busy precincts, and as the rhythmic
measure of the engine bell rang farewell chimes, a pyramid of sparks
leaped high, and the mighty mechanism fled down the track, hunting its
own echoes. The man in charge of the express office came out, looked up
and down the street; yawned, lighted his pipe, and after locking the
office, wended his way homeward.

From the adjoining room came the slow monotonous clicking of the
telegraph wires, as messages passed to other stations, and only the
switch watchman was visible, sitting on an inverted tub, and playing
snatches from "Mascotte" and "Olivette" upon a harmonicon.

Heat seemed radiating from the brick pavement outside, from the inner
walls of the waiting-room; and Beryl, finding the atmosphere almost
stifling, went out under the stars. Up and down she paced, until weary
of the dusty thoroughfare, she turned into the street which, earlier in
the day, had conducted her toward the suburbs. She knew that a full
moon had climbed above the horizon, and some malign Morgana lured her
on, with visions of cool pine glades paved with silver mosaics, and
balmy with breath of balsam; where through vast forest naves echoed the
melodious monody chanted by the reddish gold wavelets of the "branch."
In the eastern sky the florid face of a hunter's moon looked down, from
the level line of a leaden cloud, which striped the star emblazoned
shield of night, like a bar sinister; and the white lustre of her rays
was dimmed to a lurid dulness solemn and presageful.

As Beryl crossed the common near the station, and entered the pillared
aisles of the pines, the air was less oppressive, but a dun haze seemed
on every side to curtain the horizon, and the stars looked bleared and
tired in the breathless vault a