Lydia gave an exclamation of dismay. “But I must get back to Bellevue to-night!”
Paul was out of town, but she knew the agonies of anxiety ’Stashie would suffer if she did not appear. “Oh, but I can telephone,” she reminded herself.
“You kin get out there if you don’t mind takin’ the long way around,” the man explained with a friendly interest. “If you take the Garfield line and change at Ironton to the Onteora branch, it’ll bring you back on the other side of Bellevue, and Bellevue ain’t so big but what it won’t be a very long walk to where you live.”
Lydia thanked him, touched, as she so often was, with the kind and, to her, welcome absence of impersonality in working people; and, assuring herself that she had time enough to eat something before her car’s departure, betook herself to a dairy lunch-room where she ate a conscientiously substantial supper. The heat of the day had left her little appetite; but to “take care of herself” now seemed at last one of the worth-while things to do which she had always had so eager a longing.
At seven o’clock she took the trolley pointed out to her by her friend, the starter, who noticed and remembered her when she returned to the waiting-room. The evening rush was over, and for some time she was the only passenger. Then a very tired-looking, middle-aged man, an accountant perhaps, in a shabby alpaca coat, boarded the car and sank at once into a restless doze, his heat-paled face nodding about like a broken-necked doll’s. Lydia herself felt heavy on her the death-like fatigue which the last weeks had brought to her, but she was not sleepy. She looked out intently at the flat, fertile, kindly country, gradually darkening in the summer twilight. She was very fond of her home landscape. She had not taken so considerable a journey on a trolley for a long time—perhaps not since the trip to the Mallory house-party. That was a long time ago.
At the edge of thick woods the car came to a sudden stop. The lights went out. The conductor disappeared, twitched at the trolley, and went around for a consultation with the motorman, who had at once philosophically pulled off his worn glove and sat down on the step. “Power’s off!” he called back casually into the car to the accountant, who had started up wildly, with the idea, apparently, that he had been carried past his station. “We’ve got to wait till they turn her on again.”
“Oh, I don’t know. The whole system is on the bum to-day. Maybe half an hour; maybe more. Better take another nap.”
The accountant looked around the car, encountered Lydia’s eyes, and smiled sheepishly. After a time of silent waiting, enlivened only by the murmur of the conversation between the motorman and the conductor outside, the gray-haired man suggested to Lydia that it would be cooler out under the trees, and if she would like to go he would be glad to help her. When he had her established on a grassy bank he forbore further talk, and sat so still that, as the quiet moments slipped by, Lydia almost forgot him.
It was singularly pleasant there, with the rustling blackness of the wood behind them, and before them the sweep of the open farming country, shimmering faintly in the light of the stars now beginning to show in the great unbroken arch of the heavens.