st it was
dark. With all her strength she turned her boat bottom side up, shoved
it out into the lake, and threw the oars after it. Then she wrapped
herself in a dark cloak, and walked at a rapid pace up the Springton
road. When she reached the road which led to Fairfield, she stopped,
leaned against the guide-post, and looked back and hesitated. It seemed
as if the turning northward were the turning point of every thing. Her
heart was very heavy: almost her purpose failed her. "It is too late to
go back now," she said, and hurried on.

XII.

The station-master at Fairfield, if he had been asked whether a woman
took the midnight train north at Fairfield that night, would have
unhesitatingly said, "No." An instinctive wisdom seemed to direct
Hetty's every step. She waited at some little distance from the station
till the train came up: then, without going upon the station platform at
all, she entered the rear car from the opposite side of the road. No one
saw her; not even a brakeman. When the train began to move, the sense of
what she had done smote her with a sudden terror, and she sprang to her
feet, but sank down again, before any of the sleepy passengers had
observed her motion. In a few moments she was calm. Her long habits of
firm, energetic action began to resume sway: she compelled herself to
look forward into the future, and not backward into the past she was so
resolutely leaving behind her. Strangely enough, it was not her husband
that she found hardest to banish from her thoughts now, but Raby. She
could not escape from the vivid imagination of the dear child running in
terror alone through the long stretch of woods.

"I wonder if he will cry," thought poor Hetty: "I hope not." And the
tears filled her eyes. Then she fell to wondering if there would be any
doubt in anybody's mind that her boat had suddenly capsized. "They will
think I leaned over to pick something off the bushes on the edge of the
island," said she. "I have come very near capsizing that way more than
once, and I have always told Eben when it had happened. That is the
first thing he will think of." And thus, in a maze of incoherent
crowding conjectures and imaginings, all making up one great misery,
Hetty sat whirling away from her home. By and by, her brain grew less
active; thought was paralyzed by pain. She sat motionless, taking no
note of the hours of the night as they sped by, and roused from her dull
reverie only when she sa