hat his
heart was bound up in the question." But in a little while she turned
away from him again, and lying back in her chair, stared across the
smooth plains to the pale golden edge of the distant horizon. Through
the long day she sat, without moving, without taking her eyes from the
landscape, while the sunlight faded slowly away from the fields and the
afterglow flushed and waned, and the stars shone out, one by one,
through the silver web of the twilight. Once, when the porter had
offered her a pillow, she had looked round to thank him; once when a
child, toddling along the aisle, had fallen at her feet, she had bent
over to lift it, but beyond this, she had stirred only to hand her
ticket to the conductor when he aroused her by touching her arm. Where
the sunset and the afterglow had been, she saw at last only the lights
of the train reflected in the smeared glass of the window, but so
unconscious was she of any change in that utter vacancy at which she
looked, that she could not have told whether it was an hour or a day
after leaving New York that she came back to Dinwiddie. Even then she
would still have sat there, speechless, inert, unseeing, had not the
porter taken her bag from the rack over her head and accompanied her
from the glare of the train out into the dimness of the town, where the
crumbling "hacks" hitched to the decrepit horses still waited. Here her
bag was passed over to a driver, whom she vaguely remembered, and a few
minutes later she rolled, in one of the ancient vehicles, under the
pale lights of the street which led to her home. In the drug store at
the corner she saw Miss Priscilla's maid buying medicines, and she
wondered indifferently if the teacher had grown suddenly worse. Then, as
she passed John Henry's house, she recognized his large shadow as it
moved across the white shade at the window of the drawing-room. "Susan
was coming to spend last night with me," she said aloud, and for the
first and last time in her life, an ironic smile quivered upon her lips.

With a last jolt the carriage drew up at the sidewalk before her home;
the driver dismounted, grinning, from his box; and in the lighted
doorway, she saw the figure of her maid, in trim cap and apron, waiting
to welcome her. Not a petal had fallen from the bed of crimson dahlias
beside the steps; not a leaf had changed on the young maple tree, which
rose in a spire of flame toward the stars. Inside, she knew, there would
be the bri