Was his quest really almost at an end? Was it—was it? A thousand vague apprehensions tortured through his mind.
And then, all of a sudden, in the early, brisk winter twilight, Woodstock—happened!
Climbing out of the train Stanton stood for a second rubbing his eyes at the final abruptness and unreality of it all. Woodstock! What was it going to mean to him? Woodstock!
Everybody else on the platform seemed to be accepting the astonishing geographical fact with perfect simplicity. Already along the edge of the platform the quaint, old-fashioned yellow stage-coaches set on runners were fast filling up with utterly serene passengers.
A jog at his elbow made him turn quickly, and he found himself gazing into the detective's not ungenial face.
"Say," said the detective, "were you going up to the hotel first? Well you'd better not. You'd better not lose any time. She's leaving town in the morning." It was beyond human nature for the detective man not to nudge Stanton once in the ribs. "Say," he grinned, "you sure had better go easy, and not send in your name or anything." His grin broadened suddenly in a laugh. "Say," he confided, "once in a magazine I read something about a lady's 'piquant animosity'. That's her! And cute? Oh, my!"
Five minutes later, Stanton found himself lolling back in the quaintest, brightest, most pumpkin-colored coach of all, gliding with almost magical smoothness through the snow-glazed streets of the little narrow, valley-town.
"The Meredith homestead?" the driver had queried. "Oh, yes. All right; but it's quite a journey. Don't get discouraged."
A sense of discouragement regarding long distances was just at that moment the most remote sensation in Stanton's sensibilities. If the railroad journey had seemed unhappily drawn out, the sleigh-ride reversed the emotion to the point of almost telescopic calamity: a stingy, transient vista of village lights; a brief, narrow, hill-bordered road that looked for all the world like the aisle of a toy-shop, flanked on either side by high-reaching shelves where miniature house-lights twinkled cunningly; a sudden stumble of hoofs into a less-traveled snow-path, and then, absolutely unavoidable, absolutely unescapable, an old, white colonial house with its great solemn elm trees stretching out their long arms protectingly all around and about it after the blessed habit of a hundred years.
Nervously, and yet almost reverently, Stanton went crunching up the snowy path to the door, knocked resonantly with a slim, much worn old brass knocker, and was admitted promptly and hospitably by "Mrs. Meredith" herself—Molly's grandmother evidently, and such a darling little grandmother, small, like Molly; quick, like Molly; even young, like Molly, she appeared to be. Simple, sincere, and oh, so comfortable—like the fine old mahogany furniture and the dull-shining pewter, and the flickering firelight, that seemed to be everywhere.