ne will do, I was conscious all the time
of the gray minister in the aisle of the rocking coach, holding clasped
in both hands his big carpet-bag without handles. Over it I saw him
looking down in grieved consternation at the little woman huddled in the
rush seat.

"No Lord!" he said, "no Lord! Why, Delia More! You might as well say
there ain't no life in your own bones."

"So they isn't," she answered him grimly. "They keep on a-goin' just to
spite me."

"Delia More--_De_-lia More," the wheels beat out, and it was as if I had
heard the name often. Already I had noticed the woman. She had a kind of
youth, like that of Calliope, who had journeyed in town on the Through
that morning and who had somewhat mysteriously asked me not to say that
she had gone away. But Calliope's persistent youthfulness gives her a
claim upon one, while on this woman whom Doctor June perplexedly
regarded, her stifled youth imposed a forlorn aloofness, made the more
pathetic by her prettiness.

No one but the doctor himself was preparing to leave the train at
Friendship. He balanced in the aisle alone, while the few occupants of
the car sat without speaking--men dozing, children padding on the panes,
a woman twisting her thin hair tight and high. Doctor June looked at
those nearest to be sure of their tired self-absorption, but as for me,
who sat very near, I think he had long ago decided that I kept my own
thoughts and no others, since sometimes I had forgotten to give him back
a greeting. So it was in a fancied security which I was loath to be
violating, that he opened his great carpet-bag and took out a book to
lay on the girl's knee.

"Open it," he commanded her.

I saw the contour of her face tightened by her swiftly set lips as she
complied.

"Point your finger," he went on peremptorily. She must have obeyed, for
in a kind of unwilling eagerness she bent over the page, and the doctor
stooped, and together in the blurring light of the kerosene lamp in the
roof of the coach they made out something.

"... the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very
image of the things ..." I unwillingly caught, and yet not wholly
unwillingly either. And though I watched, as if much depended upon it,
the great motor-car of the Proudfits vanishing before us into the dark,
I could not forbear to glance at the doctor, who was nodding, his kind
face quickening. But the girl lifted her eyes and laughed with
deliberate scepticism.