Page:Watch and Ward (Boston, Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1878).djvu/178

Rh the wintry darkness, out of breath, but in safely. She seemed to feel about her, as she went, the old Bohemianism of her childhood; she was once more her father's daughter. She bought her ticket and found a seat in the train without adventure; with a sort of shame, in fact, that this great deed of hers should be so easy to do. But as the train rattled hideously through the long wakeful hours of the night, difficulties came thickly; in the mere oppression of her conscious purpose, in the keener vision at moments of Roger's distress, in a vague dread of the great unknown into which she was rushing. But she could do no other,—no other; with this refrain she lulled her doubts. It was strange how, as the night elapsed and her heart-beats seemed to keep time to the crashing swing of the train, her pity for Roger increased. It would have been an immense relief to be able to hate him. Her undiminished affection, forced back upon her heart, swelled and rankled there tormentingly. But if she was unable to hate Roger, she could at least abuse herself. Every circumstance of the last six years, in this new light, seemed to have taken on a vivid meaning,—a meaning that made a sort of crime of her own want of foreknowledge. She kept thinking of expiation, and determined she would write to Miss Murray, her former schoolmistress, and beg that she might come and teach little girls their scales. She kept her cousin's letter clinched in her hand; but even when she was not thinking of Roger she was not always thinking of Fenton. She could tell Hubert Lawrence now that she was as poor and friendless as he had ever wished he could see her. Toward morning she fell asleep for weariness. She