she herself followed with Bessmer, without being seen by any one
save the servants and old John Caryl.

"I am not to say anything to you, Miss Douglas, if you please, but just
the ordinary things, if you please," said Bessmer, as the wagon bore
them away. "You are to take the three o'clock train, and go--wherever
you please, she said. I was to tell you."

"Yes, Bessmer; do not be troubled. I know what to do. Will you tell
grandaunt, when you return, that I beg her to forgive what has seemed
obstinacy, but was only sad necessity. Can you remember it?"

"Yes, miss; only sad necessity," repeated Bessmer, with dropping tears.
She was a meek woman, with a comfortable convexity of person, which,
however, did not seem to give her confidence.

"I was not to know, miss, if you please, where you bought tickets to,"
she said, as the wagon stopped at the little station. "I was to give
you this, and then go right back."

She handed Anne an envelope containing a fifty-dollar note. Anne looked
at it a moment. "I will not take this, I think; you can tell grandaunt
that I have money enough for the present," she said, returning it. She
gave her hand kindly to the weeping maid, who was then driven away in
the wagon, her sun-umbrella held askew over her respectable brown
bonnet, her broad shoulders shaken with her sincere grief. A turn in the
road soon hid even this poor friend of hers from view. Anne was alone.

The station-keeper was not there; his house was near by, but hidden by a
grove of maples, and Anne, standing on the platform, seemed all alone,
the two shining rails stretching north and south having the peculiarly
solitary aspect which a one-track railway always has among green fields,
with no sign of life in sight. No train has passed, or ever will pass.
It is all a dream. She walked to and fro. She could see into the
waiting-room, which was adorned with three framed texts, and another
placard not religiously intended, but referring, on the contrary, to
steamboats, which might yet be so interpreted, namely, "Take the
Providence Line." She noted the drearily ugly round stove, faded below
to white, planted in a sand-filled box; she saw the bench, railed off
into single seats by iron elbows, and remembered that during her journey
eastward, two, if not three, of these places were generally filled with
the packages of some solitary female of middle age, clad in
half-mourning, who remained stonily unobservant of the longing glan