d Mary waved vigorously in response. It was a
long time before she turned away from the window. When she did she had
nearly recovered her self-control, and grateful for Betty's considerate
silence, she busied herself with her suit-case a few minutes, fumbling
with the lock, and making a pretence of repacking, in order to find room
for the book that Phil had brought.

The night before, in the first numb apathy of the shock, it had seemed
to her that nothing mattered any more. Nothing could make the dreadful
state of affairs more bearable; but now she acknowledged to herself that
some things did help. How wonderfully comforting Phil's assurance of
sympathy had been; the silent assurance of that firm, tender hand-clasp.
It was easier to be brave since he had called her so and expected it of
her.

Betty, in a seat across the aisle, opened a magazine, but Mary could not
settle down to read. A nervous unrest kept her going over and over in
her mind, as she had done through the previous night, the scenes that
lay ahead of her. There was the packing, and she checked off on her
fingers the many details that she must be sure to remember. There were
those borrowed books she mustn't forget to return. Her scissors were in
Cornie's room. Miss Gilmer had her best basketry patterns. There were so
many things that finally she made a memorandum of them, dully wondering
as she did so how she could think of them at all. One would have
supposed that the awful disaster that was continually in her thoughts
would have blotted out these little commonplace trivial concerns. But
they didn't. She couldn't understand it.

Presently the sound of a low crooning in the seat behind her made her
glance over her shoulder. An old coloured mammy, in the whitest of
freshly starched aprons and turbans, was rocking a child to sleep in her
arms. He was a dear little fellow, pink and white as an apple-blossom,
with a Teddy bear hugged close in his arms. One furry paw rested on his
dimpled neck. The bit of Uncle Remus song the nurse was singing had a
soothing effect on him, but it fell dismally on Mary's ears:

"Oh, don't stay long! Oh, don't stay late!
My honey, my love.
Hit ain't so mighty fur ter de Good-bye Gate,
My honey, my love!"

"The Good-bye Gate!" she repeated to herself. That was what they had
come to now, she and Jack. Not a little wicket through which one might
push his way back some day, but a great barred th