"Yes, miss; only sad necessity," repeated Bessmer, with dropping tears. She was a meek woman, with a comfortable convexity of person, which, however, did not seem to give her confidence.
"I was not to know, miss, if you please, where you bought tickets to," she said, as the wagon stopped at the little station. "I was to give you this, and then go right back."
She handed Anne an envelope containing a fifty-dollar note. Anne looked at it a moment. "I will not take this, I think; you can tell grandaunt that I have money enough for the present," she said, returning it. She gave her hand kindly to the weeping maid, who was then driven away in the wagon, her sun-umbrella held askew over her respectable brown bonnet, her broad shoulders shaken with her sincere grief. A turn in the road soon hid even this poor friend of hers from view. Anne was alone.
The station-keeper was not there; his house was near by, but hidden by a grove of maples, and Anne, standing on the platform, seemed all alone, the two shining rails stretching north and south having the peculiarly solitary aspect which a one-track railway always has among green fields, with no sign of life in sight. No train has passed, or ever will pass. It is all a dream. She walked to and fro. She could see into the waiting-room, which was adorned with three framed texts, and another placard not religiously intended, but referring, on the contrary, to steamboats, which might yet be so interpreted, namely, "Take the Providence Line." She noted the drearily ugly round stove, faded below to white, planted in a sand-filled box; she saw the bench, railed off into single seats by iron elbows, and remembered that during her journey eastward, two, if not three, of these places were generally filled with the packages of some solitary female of middle age, clad in half-mourning, who remained stonily unobservant of the longing glances cast upon the space she occupied. These thoughts came to her mechanically. When a decision has finally been made, and for the present nothing more can be done, the mind goes wandering off on trivial errands; the flight of a bird, the passage of the fairy car of thistle-down, are sufficient to set it in motion. It seemed to her that she had been there a long time, when a step came through the grove: Hosea Plympton—or, as he was called in the neighborhood, Hosy Plim—was unlocking the station door. Anne bought her ticket, and had her trunk checked; she hoped to reach the half-house before midnight.
Hosy having attended to his official business with dignity, now came out to converse unofficially with his one passenger. "From Caryl's, ain't you?"
"Yes," replied Anne.
"Goin' to New York?"
"Yes."
"I haven't yet ben to that me-tropo-lis," said Hosy. "On some accounts I should admire to go, on others not. Ben long at Caryl's?"
"Yes, some time."