not stop at Banbridge. Then she
heard a faint rumble of another freight on the Lehigh Valley road.
Then at last came the train for which she had been looking, the train
on which her father might come, the train on which he surely would
come unless some terrible thing had happened. She heard distinctly,
with her sharpened ears, the stop of the train at the station, the
letting off of steam. She heard the engine-bell. She heard it resume
its advance with slowly gathering motion. She saw a rosy flash of
fire in the distance from the engine. Then she waited for
carriage-wheels, or for the sight of her father coming up the road.
It was quite soon that she heard carriage-wheels on the frozen
ground, and she ran to the door and opened it, but the carriage
passed. Samson Rawdy was taking home the next neighbor. "It will take
papa considerably longer if he walks," she told herself, and she
locked the door and returned to her station at the window. She saw
again a dark figure approaching on the road outside, and she thought
with a great throb of joy that he had surely come, but the figure did
not enter the grounds. She allowed twenty-five minutes for him to
walk from the station. She said to herself if, when twenty-five
minutes had elapsed, he had not come, she should certainly know that
he had not come on that train. She did not dare look at the clock,
but after a while, when she did so, she found it was twenty-seven
minutes after eight. Still that clock often gained. She ran out in
the kitchen and looked at the clock there, but that had stopped at
half-past seven. It was very seldom that anybody remembered to wind
up the kitchen-clock since Marie went. Her own little watch was at
the jeweller's in New Sanderson for repairs. She had nothing to
depend on except the dining-room clock, which, to her great comfort,
so often gained. She decided that she might wait until ten minutes of
nine by that clock before she gave up hope, but the next time she
went trembling out to look at it it was only three minutes before
nine. Then it occurred to her that her father might easily have had
an errand at one of the stores before coming home. The post-office
would be closed; she had no hope for that, but he might have had some
business. She thought that she might allow until half-past nine
before she entirely gave up her father having come on the
eight-seventeen train. It was then that she began running out on the
lawn to the entrance of the dri