s, seh. No seh, cayn't
'zac'ly tell jis how long we be kep' here, but 'f you dislikes to wait,
Cap, you needn'. You kin teck a street-cyar here what'll lan' you right
down 'mongs' de hotels an' things; yass, seh. See what; de wreck? No,
seh, it's up in de yard whah dey don't 'llow you to pa-ass."

Out in the darkness beside the train March stood a moment. He could see
Miss Garnet very plainly at her bright window and was wondering how she
and her friends, but especially she, would take it if he should go back
and help them while away this tiresome detention. If she had answered
that last smile of his, or if she were showing, now, any tendency at all
to look out the window, he might have returned; but no, howdy after
farewell lacked dignity. The street-car came along just then and Barbara
saw him get into it.

LVIII.

TOGETHER AGAIN

March did not put up at the most famous and palatial hotel; it was full.
He went to another much smaller and quieter, and equally expensive. When
he had taken supper he walked the dazzling streets till midnight, filled
with the strangeness of the place and the greater strangeness of his
being there, and with numberless fugitive reflections upon the day just
gone, the life behind it, and the life before, but totally without those
shaped and ordered trains of thought which no one has except in books.

Sometimes tenderly, sometimes bitterly, Fannie came to mind, in emotions
rather than memories, and as if she were someone whom he should never
see again. Once it occurred to him that these ghost walkings of thought
and feelings about her must be very much like one's thoughts of a limb
shattered in some disaster and lately cut off by a surgeon. The simile
was not pleasant, but he did not see why he should want a pleasant one.
Only by an effort could he realize she was still of this world, and that
by and by they would be back in Suez again, meeting casually,
habitually, and in a much more commonplace and uninteresting way than
ever they had done in the past. He shuddered, then he sighed, and then
he said ahem! and gave himself the look of a man of affairs. On men who
stared at him he retorted with a frown of austere inquiry, not aware
that they were merely noticing how handsome he was.

For a time he silently went through minute recapitulations of his recent
colloquies with Miss Garnet, who seemed already surprisingly far away;
much farther than any railroad speed could at all accoun