Page:Minnie's Bishop and Other Stories (1915).djvu/61

 form Tom Dever and his wife. They were both weeping. I looked at the window of the carriage in front of them and saw Onnie.

Alone among the crowd of departing girls she was not crying. Her face was very pale. Her eyes, unnaturally large, seemed full of the sorrow of farewell; but her head was proudly posed. She stood upright while the others stooped or crouched.

I felt a sudden thrill. The girl was going out into a wide, strange world, sad, but not in despair—going to win through, to conquer, not to be beaten. From the carriage in which I sat I heard the last loud cry as the train moved out the blessing, "God be with you, and good luck!" the pitiful cheer; and then Onnie's voice, clear above the wailing:

"Good-bye! Good-bye!"

I bade farewell to Onnie an hour later when I left the train at the station where I had to stop. I asked her whether she wanted to go to America or would rather have stayed at home. Her answer seemed to me characteristic of the fatalism of our people.

"Sure, it was before me anyway," she said; "and it might as well be now as some other time. What was there for me at home?—only the daylight."

There was, of course, more than the daylight. There were lobsters in that cleft of the rock, to be hauled out of it when the tide was low. I reminded