Hester Marvin stood on the windy platform gazing after the train. Her limbs were cramped and stiff after the long night journey; the grey morning hour discouraged her; and the landscape—a stretch of grey-green marsh with a horizon-line of slate-roofed cottages terminated by a single factory chimney—was not one to raise the spirits. Even the breeze blowing across the marsh had an unfamiliar edge. She felt it, and shivered.
She had been the only passenger to alight here from the train, which had brought her almost all the way from the Midlands; and as it steamed off, its smoke blown level along the carriage roofs, her gaze followed it wistfully, almost forlornly, with a sense of lost companionship. She knew this to be absurd, and yet she felt it.
Between the chimney and this ridge the train passed out of sight; but still her gaze followed the long curve of the metals across the marsh. They stretched away, and with them the country seemed to expand and flatten itself, yielding to the sky an altogether disproportionate share of the prospect—at any rate in eyes accustomed to the close elms and crooked hedgerows of Warwickshire.
She withdrew her gaze at last, and glancing up the long platform spied her solitary trunk, as absurdly forlorn as herself. A tall man—the stationmaster—bent over it, examining the label, and she walked towards him, glancing up as she passed the station clock.
"No use your looking at him," said the station-master, straightening himself up in time to observe the glance. "He never kept time yet, and don't mean to begin. Breaks my heart, he do."
"How far is it from here to Troy?"
"Three miles and a half, we reckon it; but you may call it four, counting the hills."
"Oh, there are hills, are there?" said Hester, and looking around she blushed; for indeed the country was hilly on three sides of her and flat only in the direction whither she had been staring after the train.
The stationmaster did not observe her confusion. "Were you expecting anyone to meet you, miss?" he asked.
"Yes, from Troy. A Mr. Benny—Mr. Peter Benny." She felt for the letter in her pocket.