An hour later, Mrs. Hasleton’s maid was packing a suit case while her mistress, dressed in a street gown and seated at her desk, wrote half a dozen notes. Presently looking up, she said: “Elise, you will follow me on Tuesday, as I had arranged, with the trunks packed for a two weeks’ visit. I have written the directions for you.” Then, glancing through some time-tables, “Tell Peter to be here at two to drive me to the station.”
“A bad day for travel? Not at all; the snow packs in the streets, that in the open country blows off and amounts to nothing.”
Why she did it, she could not have told, but Mrs. Hasleton chose the least direct way of reaching her destination; and, instead of going as usual to the parlour car, entered a day coach, where she sat tapping her foot nervously, waiting for the train to pull out, without so much as lifting her heavy brown veil.
It was in itself a novel sensation, this leaving with no one to say good-by, to go to a city where no one expected her; for she had determined to spend the next two days at a woman’s club to which she belonged, going to the Barneys’ on the following Tuesday, that being the time of the invitation. She had not yet told her change of destination to Elise.
The man strode about the half-cleared streets until he was physically almost exhausted, and then entered his club, where he hid himself in a corner, curling up like a half-sick and surly dog who both craves and resents sympathy. A group of younger men entered, joking each other and harmlessly boisterous. Spying Hasleton, they proceeded to unearth him from his lair. Shouted one, “We have a scheme afoot for Sunday, and we want a steady head like yours to come along and collect us and see that we start for home straight on Monday morning.”
“Grumpy and got a cold? Nonsense, you want some lunch.”
The Milk Freight crawled in on the slippery rails at the Hattertown siding only an hour late, which was doing very well, as sleet had followed the snow and everything was a glare of ice. But now the threatening snow clouds had vanished and the stars were piercingly clear.
The Sweezy boy had gone up for Miranda Banks in a sleigh before eight o’clock, and she waited patiently in the little room outside the ticket booth, with only the two benches and the air-tight stove for company. The natives who usually gathered at the station on winter evenings were mostly in bed, tired out by snow shovelling, the few remaining having collected at Sweezy’s Hotel to listen to his accounts of other February storms he had known.
Inside the booth the sick operator’s wife, who was waiting until the freight and express had passed safely through before closing up, alternately dozed and started to listen to the tick-tickety-tick, that sounded to the girl outside as mysterious as the death-watch beetle in a wall.