he joy of such things was gone now, the rapture of
holidays and new sights. These were over, so she told herself. Sorrow
had quenched the thrills forever.

The kind conductor led her to the eating room, and when she would not
eat his concern drew greater than ever. He took a strange interest in
this young lady who had such a face and such eyes. He pointed her out to
his friend the Truro conductor, and gave him some sandwiches and fruit
which he himself had bought, with instructions to press them on her
during the afternoon.

Cynthia could not eat. She hated this place, with its memories. Hated
it, too, as a mart where men were bought and sold, for the wording
of those articles ran in her head as though some priest of evil were
chanting them in her ears. She did not remember then the sweeter aspect
of the old town, its pretty homes set among their shaded gardens--homes
full of good and kindly people. State House affairs were far removed
from most of these, and the sickness and corruption of the body politic.
And this political corruption, had she known it, was no worse than that
of the other states in the wide Union: not so bad, indeed, as many,
though this was small comfort. No comfort at all to Cynthia, who did not
think of it.

After a while she rose and followed the new conductor to the Truro
train, glad to leave the capital behind her. She was going to the
hills--to the mountains. They, in truth, could not change, though the
seasons passed over them, hot and cold, wet and dry. They were immutable
in their goodness. Presently she saw them, the lower ones: the waters of
the little stream beside her broke the black bonds of ice and raced over
the rapids; the engine was puffing and groaning on the grade. Then the
sun crept out, slowly, from the indefinable margin of vapor that hung
massed over the low country.

Yes, she had come to the hills. Up and up climbed the train, through
the little white villages in the valley nooks, banked with whiter snow;
through the narrow gorges,--sometimes hanging over them,--under steep
granite walls seared with ice-filled cracks, their brows hung with
icicles.

Truro Pass is not so high as the Brenner, but it has a grand, wild look
in winter, remote as it is from the haunts of men. A fitting refuge,
it might be, for a great spirit heavy with the sins of the world
below. Such a place might have been chosen, in the olden time, for a
monastery--a gray fastness built against the black