anxious to settle themselves at once for the night.
Everybody was talking, sitting down, and getting up again, turning the
seats backwards and forwards to suit their parties, or their fancies,
soothing the shivering, crying children, or discussing the probability
of being impeded by the snow. But when the train was fairly in motion,
when the conductor had made his progress through the cars, when
everybody had got their tickets, and there was no more to be done, all
subsided gradually into a dull sleepy quiet, broken occasionally by a
child's cry, but still undisturbed enough to let those passengers who
did not care to sleep, think in peace.

Maurice thought, uselessly, but persistently. He thought of the past,
when he had been quite happy, looking forward to a laborious life with
Lucia to brighten it. He thought of the future which must now have one
of two aspects--either cold, matter-of-fact and solitary, in the great
empty house at Hunsdon without Lucia, or bright and perfect beyond even
his former dreams, in that same great old house with her. He meant to
win her, however, sooner or later, and the real trouble which he feared
at present was nothing worse than delay.

CHAPTER IV.

Mrs. Costello and Lucia found their journey from Cacouna to New York a
very melancholy one. They had gone through so much already, that change
and travel had no power to stimulate their overstrained nerves to any
further excitement; the time of reaction had begun, and a sort of
languid indifference, which was in itself a misery, seemed to have taken
possession of them. Even Lucia's spirits, generally strong both for
enjoyment or for suffering, were completely subdued; she sat by the
window of the car looking out at the wintry landscape all day long, yet
saw nothing, or remembered nothing that she had seen. Once or twice she
thought, "Perhaps in a few days more, Maurice will be passing over this
very line; he will be disappointed when he reaches home and finds that
we are gone;" but all her meditations were dreamy and unreal--her mind
acted mechanically. A kind of moral catalepsy benumbed her. Afterwards
when she remembered this time, she wondered at herself; she could not
comprehend the absence of sensation with which she had left the dear
home and all the familiar objects of her whole life, the incapability of
feeling either keen sorrow at the parting, or hope in the unknown
future. The days they spent in hurrying hour by hour fu