lor."

Aunt Maria stood still, listening, until she heard the parlor door
open. She was still filled with vague suspicion. She did not hear
quite as acutely as formerly, and Maria had no difficulty about
leaving the parlor unheard the second after she entered it, and
getting her hat and coat and a small satchel which she had brought
down-stairs with her from the hat-tree in the entry. Then she opened
the front door noiselessly and stole out. She went rapidly down the
street in the direction of the bridge, which she had been accustomed
to cross when she taught school in Amity. She met Jessy Ramsey, now
grown to be as tall as herself, and pretty with a half-starved,
pathetic prettiness. Jessy was on her way to work. She went out by
the day, doing washings. She stopped when she met Maria, and gave a
little, shy look--her old little-girl look--at her. Maria also
stopped. "Good-morning, Jessy," said she. Then she asked how she was,
if her cough was better, and where she was going to work. Then,
suddenly, to Jessy's utter amazement and rapture, she kissed her. "I
never forget what a good little girl you were," said she, and was
gone. Jessy stood for a moment staring after her. Then she wiped her
eyes and proceed to her scene of labor.

Maria went to the railroad station. She was just in time for a train.
She got on the rear car and sat in the last seat. She looked about
and did not see anybody whom she knew. She recalled how she had run
away before, and how Wollaston had brought her back. She knew that it
would not happen so again. She was on a through train which did not
stop at the station where he had found her. When the train slowed up
a little in passing that station, she saw the bench on the platform
where she had sat, and a curious sensation came over her. She was
like one who has made the leap and realizes that there is nothing
more to dread, and who gets even a certain abnormal pleasure from the
sensation. When the conductor came through the car she purchased her
ticket for New York, and asked when the train was due in the city.
When she learned that it was due at an hour so late that it would be
impossible for her to go, as she had planned, to Edgham that night,
she did not, even then, for the time being, feel in the least
dismayed. She had plenty of money. Her last quarter's salary was in
her little satchel. The train was made up of Pullmans only, and it
was by a good chance that she had secured a seat. She gazed