“Katherine!” cried Peggy in consternation, “they’re waiting to get in. We’ll starve before our turn comes!”
And all the long patient row of people laughed, for nowhere else in traveling is there a more open and friendly spirit than among those poor patient and hungry sufferers lined up to wait their turn to be served at dinner. Groups returning began to push by them after a while, their faces as satisfied in expression as the others were anxious.
“You see,” Katherine thought it out, “we came at the first call, but our car was so far away that by the time we could get back here, all the people from the nearer cars had gotten ahead of us.”
But once seated facing each other at a little table, with the electric candle shedding its radiant light on the white cloth before them, and with the pale snow outside fluttering against the windows, and all so warm and comfortable inside, the tedium of waiting was forgotten and all things beyond the scope of the immediate attractive present were blotted out from their contented spirits.
They leaned their elbows on the table and looked across at each other with blissful satisfaction.
“Peggy,” said Katherine, and “Katherine,” began Peggy eagerly, and then both in the same breath they demanded of each other the answer to the momentous problem of the moment, “What are we going to eat?”
Never had a menu seemed as full of wonderful possibilities as that one, never had “Milk-fed chicken with Virginia ham” tasted finer when it was brought, and never, never had two more healthy young appetites been brought into play than Katherine and Peggy manifested while the train rocked along with them at breakneck speed taking them faster and faster and faster right into the heart of Christmas vacation.
After the edge of their hunger had been worn off and they had turned their attention more delicately to ice cream and demi-tasse, their thoughts drifted backward to events at Andrews, which seemed already very much in the dim and distant past.
“Katherine, when you said you felt as if Mr. Huntington would soon find his grandson, did you have any reason for saying that, or was it just to comfort him?” Peggy inquired reminiscently.
“No, honestly, Peggy,” insisted Katherine, “I could feel it in my mind just like anything that it will happen. Did you notice I didn’t say anything about his daughter? That was because I had no such feeling about her—so you see it wasn’t just to make him feel better at all. It’s strange, isn’t it, how thoughts about the future come to you sometimes?”