to the window with
a haughty motion, and watched her mother out of sight, a gaunt, dark
old figure disappearing under low green elm branches.

Chapter III

It was many years since Mrs. Field had taken any but the most trivial
journeys. Elliot was a hundred and twenty miles away. She must go to
Boston; then cross the city to the other depot, where she would take
the Elliot train. This elderly unsophisticated woman might very
reasonably have been terrified at the idea of taking this journey
alone, but she was not. She never thought of it.

The latter half of the road to the Green River station lay through an
unsettled district. There were acres of low birch woods and lusty
meadow-lands. This morning they were covered with a gold-green dazzle
of leaves. To one looking across them, they almost seemed played over
by little green flames; now and then a young birch tree stood away
from the others, and shone by itself like a very torch of spring.
Mrs. Field walked steadily through it. She had never paused to take
much thought of the beauty of nature; to-day a tree all alive and
twinkling with leaves might, for all her notice, have been naked and
stiff with frost.

She did not seem to walk fast, but her long steps carried her over
the ground well. It was long before train-time when she came in sight
of the little station with its projecting piazza roofs. She entered
the ladies' room and bought her ticket, then she sat down and waited.
There were two other women there--middle-aged countrywomen in awkward
wool gowns and flat straw bonnets, with a certain repressed
excitement in their homely faces. They were setting their large,
faithful, cloth-gaitered feet a little outside their daily ruts, and
going to visit some relatives in a neighboring town; they were almost
overcome by the unusualness of it.

Jane Field was a woman after their kind, and the look on their faces
had its grand multiple in the look on hers. She had not only stepped
out of her rut, but she was going out of sight of it forever.

She sat there stiff and silent, her two feet braced against the
floor, ready to lift her at the signal of the train, her black
leather bag grasped firmly in her right hand.

The two women eyed her furtively. One nudged the other. "Know who
that is?" she whispered. But neither of them knew. They were from the
adjoining town, which this railroad served as well as Green River.

Sometimes Mrs. Field looked at them, but with