The men and women, and even the children among their fellow passengers, had been looking at the tempestuous passion of grief in the little girl, but when they saw her black dress trimmed with crape they looked in compassion, not in curiosity.
Roma really did not know what to say to this unique child, but only gazed on her with eyes full of love and sympathy.
The sun went down behind the line of mountains toward which they were being rapidly whirled.
The porter came into the car to light the lamps, and the illumination within prevented them from seeing the beauty and brilliancy of the starlight night around them.
They crossed a spur of the Alleghany Mountains without getting a view of their grandeur, and rushed westward into the high-hilled and deep-valed and heavily wooded country in which Goblin Hall is situated.
Owlet went to sleep again.
Many of their fellow passengers dozed in their chairs.
In the sleeping car ahead of them people were going to bed.
Roma felt too anxious to think of sleeping. The nearer she approached the house where she was to meet Will Harcourt, and hear his vindication—for she was sure that his statement would be a perfect vindication of himself—the more restless and impatient she became. She had only written her letter to him on the day before her journey. She knew that he could scarcely yet have received it, and that if he should start for Goblin Hall immediately on the receipt of her summons it must be from twelve to eighteen hours yet before he could arrive there. Yet, still, she was impatient to get to the end of her journey, as if she expected to meet him then and there.
It was nine o’clock when they reached Pine Hill Junction, where they left the main line for the little train that passed Goeberlin in its course.