d Terry--dazed, shaking, but grateful--fled. Down the noisy aisle, up
the stairs, to the street. Back to her rooming house. Out again, with
her suitcase, and into the right railroad station somehow, at last. Not
another Wetona train until midnight. She shrank into a remote corner of
the waiting room and there she huddled until midnight watching the
entrances like a child who is fearful of ghosts in the night.

The hands of the station clock seemed fixed and immovable. The hour
between eleven and twelve was endless. She was on the train. It was
almost morning. It was morning. Dawn was breaking. She was home! She had
the house key clutched tightly in her hand long before she turned
Schroeder's corner. Suppose he had come home! Suppose he had jumped a
town and come home ahead of his schedule. They had quarrelled once
before, and he had done that.

Up the front steps. Into the house. Not a sound. She stood there a
moment in the early morning half-light. She peered into the dining room.
The table, with its breakfast debris, was as she had left it. In the
kitchen the coffee pot stood on the gas stove. She was home. She was
safe. She ran up the stairs, got out of her clothes and into crisp
gingham morning things. She flung open windows everywhere. Down-stairs
once more she plunged into an orgy of cleaning. Dishes, table, stove,
floor, rugs. She washed, scoured, flapped, swabbed, polished. By eight
o'clock she had done the work that would ordinarily have taken until
noon. The house was shining, orderly, and redolent of soapsuds.

During all this time she had been listening, listening, with her
sub-conscious ear. Listening for something she had refused to name
definitely in her mind, but listening, just the same; waiting.

And then, at eight o'clock, it came. The rattle of a key in the lock.
The boom of the front door. Firm footsteps.

He did not go to meet her, and she did not go to meet him. They came
together and were in each other's arms. She was weeping.

"Now, now, old girl. What's there to cry about? Don't, honey; don't.
It's all right."

She raised her head then, to look at him. How fresh, and rosy, and big
he seemed, after that little sallow, yellow restaurant rat.

"How did you get here? How did you happen--?"

"Jumped all the way from Ashland. Couldn't get a sleeper, so I sat up
all night. I had to come back and square things with you, Terry. My mind
just wasn't on my work. I kept thinking how I'd talked--how