th," said the clerk. "They're cousins, and they've
got an aunt living there that they stay with. They used to go away
winters,--teaching, I guess,--but this last year they stayed right
through. Been down to Springfield, they said, and just stopped the night
because the accommodation don't go any farther. Wake you up last night?
I had to put 'em into the room next to yours, and girls usually talk."

Langbourne answered that it would have taken a good deal of talking to
wake him the night before, and then he lounged across to the time-table
hanging on the wall, and began to look up the trains for Upper Ashton
Falls.

"If you want to go to the Falls," said the clerk, "there's a through
train at four, with a drawing-room on it, that will get you there by
five."

"Oh, I fancy I was looking up the New York trains," Langbourne returned.
He did not like these evasions, but in his consciousness of Miss Simpson
he seemed unable to avoid them. The clerk went out on the veranda to
talk with a farmer bringing supplies, and Langbourne ran to the
register, and read there the names of Barbara F. Simpson and Juliet D.
Bingham. It was Miss Simpson who had registered for both, since her name
came first, and the entry was in a good, simple hand, which was like a
man's in its firmness and clearness. He turned from the register decided
to take the four-o'clock train for Upper Ashton Falls, and met a
messenger with a telegram which he knew was for himself before the boy
could ask his name. His partner had fallen suddenly sick; his recall was
absolute, his vacation was at an end; nothing remained for him but to
take the first train back to New York. He thought how little prescient
he had been in his pretence that he was looking the New York trains up;
but the need of one had come already, and apparently he should never
have any use for a train to Upper Ashton Falls.

IV.

All the way back to New York Langbourne was oppressed by a sense of loss
such as his old disappointment in love now seemed to him never to have
inflicted. He found that his whole being had set toward the unseen owner
of the voice which had charmed him, and it was like a stretching and
tearing of the nerves to be going from her instead of going to her. He
was as much under duress as if he were bound by a hypnotic spell. The
voice continually sounded, not in his ears, which were filled with the
noises of the train, as usual, but in the inmost of his spirit, where it
was