y
--whither? The sheer sweetness and terror of it!

"Don't, don't!" she murmured desperately. "You mustn't!"

"Janet--we're going to be married, sweetheart,--just as soon as we can.
Won't you trust me? For God's sake, don't be cruel. You're my wife,
now--"

His voice seemed to come from a great distance. And from a great
distance, too, her own in reply, drowned as by falling waters.

"Do you love me?--will you love me always--always?"

And he answered hoarsely, "Yes--always--I swear it, Janet." He had found
her lips again, he was pulling her toward a door on the far side of the
room, and suddenly, as he opened it, her resistance ceased....

The snow made automobiling impossible, and at half past nine that evening
Ditmar had escorted Janet to the station in a cab, and she had taken the
train for Hampton. For a while she sat as in a trance. She knew that
something had happened, something portentous, cataclysmic, which had
irrevocably changed her from the Janet Bumpus who had left Hampton that
same morning--an age ago. But she was unable to realize the
metamorphosis. In the course of a single day she had lived a lifetime,
exhausted the range of human experience, until now she was powerless to
feel any more. The car was filled with all sorts and conditions of people
returning to homes scattered through the suburbs and smaller cities north
of Boston--a mixed, Sunday-night crowd; and presently she began, in a
detached way, to observe them. Their aspects, their speech and manners
had the queer effect of penetrating her consciousness without arousing
the emotional judgments of approval or disapproval which normally should
have followed. Ordinarily she might have felt a certain sympathy for the
fragile young man on the seat beside her who sat moodily staring through
his glasses at the floor: and the group across the aisle would surely
have moved her to disgust. Two couples were seated vis-a-vis, the men
apparently making fun of a "pony" coat one of the girls was wearing. In
spite of her shrieks, which drew general attention, they pulled it from
her back--an operation regarded by the conductor himself with tolerant
amusement. Whereupon her companion, a big, blond Teuton with an inane
guffaw, boldly thrust an arm about her waist and held her while he
presented the tickets. Janet beheld all this as one sees dancers through
a glass, without hearing the music.

Behind her two men fell into conversation.

"I guess there's wel