d in Valley City three days longer on this
governess chance. He ate three more dinners in the comfortless
dining-room, slept three more nights in the gaudy bedroom, and was at
the railway station five times each day, to wit, at the hours when the
trains arrived from the east. If they had waited at Stringhampton until
he had had time to return to New York, they would be coming on now. But
no one came. The fourth day opened with dull gray rain; the smoke of the
manufactories hung over the valley like a pall. In the dining-room there
was a sour odor of fresh paint, and from the window he could see only a
line of hacks, the horses standing in the rain with drooping heads,
while the drivers, in a row against an opposite wall, looked, in their
long oil-skin coats, as though they were drawn up there in their black
shrouds to be shot. In a fit of utter disgust he rang for his bill,
ordered a carriage, and drove to the station: he would take the morning
train for New York.

Yet when the carriage was dismissed, he let the express roll away
without him, while he walked to and fro, waiting for an incoming train.
The train was behind time; when it did come, there was no one among its
passengers whom he had ever seen before. With an anathema upon his own
folly, he took the day accommodation eastward. He would return to New
York without any more senseless delays. And then at Stringhampton
Junction he was the only person who alighted. His idea was to make
inquiries there. He spent two hours of that afternoon in the rain, under
a borrowed umbrella, and three alone in the waiting-room. No such
persons as he described had been seen at Stringhampton, and as the
settlement was small, and possessed of active curiosity, there remained
no room for doubt. There was the chance that they had followed him to
Valley City an hour later on a freight train with car attached, in which
case he had missed them. And there was the other chance that they had
gone northward by the branch road. But why should they go northward?
They lived in Valley City, or near there; their tickets were marked
"Valley City." The branch led to the Northern Line, by which one could
reach Chicago, St. Louis, Omaha, the wilderness, but not Valley City.
The gentleman might go up as far as the Northern Line, and inquire of
the station agent there, suggested the Stringhampton ticket-seller, who
balanced a wooden tooth-pick in his mouth lightly, like a cigarette. But
the gentleman,