er, hardly breathing while the two Trail Town men and a solitary
traveling man had alighted. There had been no one else. In terror lest
the child should be carried past the station, she had questioned the
conductor, begged him to go in and look again, parleyed with him until
he had swung his lantern. Then she had turned away with the children,
utterly unable to formulate anything. There was no other train to stop
at Old Trail Town that night. It must mean disaster ... indefinable
disaster that had somehow engulfed him and had not pointed the way that
he had gone. She recalled, now, that she had refused Buff Miles's
invitation to ride, but had suffered him to take the children. Then she
had set out to walk home.

On that walk home she had unlived her plans. Obscure speculations,
stirring in her fear, at first tormented her, and then gave place to the
conclusion that John had changed his mind, had seen perhaps that he
could not after all let the child go so far, had found some one else to
take him; and that the morrow would bring a letter to tell her so. In
any case, she was not to have him. The conclusion swept her with the
vigour of certainty. But instead of the relief for which she would have
looked, that certainty gave her nothing but desolation. Until the moment
when the expectation seemed to die she had not divined how it had grown
into her days, as subtly as the growth of little cell and little cell.
And now the weight upon her, instead of lifting, soaring in the
possibility of the return of her old freedom, lay the more heavily, and
her sense of oppression became abysmal.... "Something is going to
happen," she had kept saying. "Something _has_ happened...."

So she had got on toward her own door. There the swift relief was like
an upbearing into another air, charged with more intimate largess for
life. Now Mary sat in the stable in a sense of happy reality that
clothed all her feeling--rather, in a sense of superreality, which she
did not know how to accept.... So, slowly singing in her as she sat at
her task, came that which had waited until she should open the way....

In the stable there was that fusion of shadow and light in which captive
spaces reveal all their mystery. Little areas of brightness, of
functioning; then dimness, then the deep. Brightness in which surfaces
of worn floor, slivered wall, dusty glass, showed values more specific
than those of colour. Dimness in which gray rafters with wavering edg