said Dosia.

"Yes, yes. Perhaps we may come to some farm-house where they will let us
have a wagon. It is seven miles to Haledon--that isn't very far! I often
walked five miles with Justin before I was married, and a mile or two
more is nothing. There are plenty of trains from Haledon."

"Oh, we can do it easily enough," said Dosia, though her heart was as
lead within her breast. "You had better eat some of these biscuits
before we start," she advised, taking them out of the bag; and Lois
munched them obediently, and drank some tepid water from a pitcher which
Dosia had found inside. As she put it back again in its place, she
slipped to the side of the platform and looked down the moon-filled,
narrow valley.

Through all this journey Dosia had carried double thoughts; her voice
called where none might hear. It spoke now as she whispered, with hands
outspread:

"Oh, _why_ weren't you in when I went for you? Why didn't you come and
take care of us, when I needed you so much? Why did you let us go off
this way? You might have known! Why _don't_ you come and take care of
us? There's no one to take care of us but you! _You_ could!" A dry sob
stopped the words--the deep, inherent cry of womankind to man for help,
for succor. She stooped over and picked up an oakleaf that had lain on
the ground since the winter, and pressed it to her bosom, and sent it
fluttering off on a gust of wind down the incline, as if it could indeed
take her message with it, before she went back to Lois.

After some hesitation as to the path,--one led across the rails from
where they were sitting,--they finally took that behind the station,
which broadened out into a road that lay along the wooded slope above,
from which they could look down at intervals and see the track below.
One side of that road was bordered by a high wire fencing inclosing
pieces of woodland, sometimes so thick as to be impenetrable, while
along other stretches there would be glimpsed through the trees some
farther, open field. To the right, toward the railway there were only
woods and no fencing.

They two walked off briskly at first, but the road was of a heavy,
loose, shelving soil in which the foot sank at each step; the grass at
the edge was wet with dew and intersected by the ridged, branching roots
of trees; the pace grew, perforce, slower and slower still. They took
turns in carrying the baby, whose small bundled form began to seem as if
weighted with lead.

[Il