sly upward and formed a mimic cloud-region over their heads.
A train of cars was just ready for a start; the locomotive was fretting
and fuming, like a steed impatient for a headlong rush; and the bell
rang out its hasty peal, so well expressing the brief summons which
life vouchsafes to us in its hurried career. Without question or
delay,--with the irresistible decision, if not rather to be called
recklessness, which had so strangely taken possession of him, and
through him of Hepzibah,--Clifford impelled her towards the cars, and
assisted her to enter. The signal was given; the engine puffed forth
its short, quick breaths; the train began its movement; and, along with
a hundred other passengers, these two unwonted travellers sped onward
like the wind.

At last, therefore, and after so long estrangement from everything that
the world acted or enjoyed, they had been drawn into the great current
of human life, and were swept away with it, as by the suction of fate
itself.

Still haunted with the idea that not one of the past incidents,
inclusive of Judge Pyncheon's visit, could be real, the recluse of the
Seven Gables murmured in her brother's ear,--

"Clifford! Clifford! Is not this a dream?"

"A dream, Hepzibah!" repeated he, almost laughing in her face. "On the
contrary, I have never been awake before!"

Meanwhile, looking from the window, they could see the world racing
past them. At one moment, they were rattling through a solitude; the
next, a village had grown up around them; a few breaths more, and it
had vanished, as if swallowed by an earthquake. The spires of
meeting-houses seemed set adrift from their foundations; the
broad-based hills glided away. Everything was unfixed from its
age-long rest, and moving at whirlwind speed in a direction opposite to
their own.

Within the car there was the usual interior life of the railroad,
offering little to the observation of other passengers, but full of
novelty for this pair of strangely enfranchised prisoners. It was
novelty enough, indeed, that there were fifty human beings in close
relation with them, under one long and narrow roof, and drawn onward by
the same mighty influence that had taken their two selves into its
grasp. It seemed marvellous how all these people could remain so
quietly in their seats, while so much noisy strength was at work in
their behalf. Some, with tickets in their hats (long travellers these,
before whom lay a hundred miles