And she replied: “Oh, no. I can’t afford that.”
So he found her a whole seat in the common car, and telling her he would speak of her to the new conductor, bade her good-bye, and she was left alone.
Very nervously she watched her fellow passengers as they came hurrying in,—men, mostly, it seemed to her,—rough-looking men, too, for there had been a horserace that day at a point on the Harlem road, and they were returning from it. Occasionally some one of them stopped and looked at the girl in black, who sat so straight and still, with her hand-bag held down upon the vacant seat beside her as if to keep it intact. But no one offered to take it, and Maude breathed more freely as the crowded train moved slowly from the depot. After a little the new conductor came and spoke to her and looked at her ticket and went out, and then she was really alone. New England, with its rocks and hills and mountains, was behind her. Mother, and John, and home were far away, and the lump in her throat grew larger, and there crept over her such a sense of dreariness and homesickness, that she would have cried outright if she dared to. There were only six women in the car besides herself. All the rest were wolves; she felt sure of that, they talked and laughed so loud, and spit so much tobacco-juice. They were so different from the stranger on the boat, she thought, wondering who he was and where he had gone. How pleasantly he had spoken to her, and how she wished——She got no further, for a voice said to her:
“Can I sit by you? Every other seat is taken.”
“Yes, oh, yes. I am so glad,” Maude exclaimed involuntarily in her delight at recognizing the stranger, and springing to her feet she offered him the seat next to the window.
“Oh, no,” he said, with a smile which would have won the confidence of any girl. “Keep that yourself. You will be more comfortable there. Are you going to ride all night?”
“Yes, I am going to Canandaigua,” she replied.
“To Canandaigua!” he repeated, looking at her a little curiously; but he asked no more questions then, and busied himself with adjusting his bag and his large traveling shawl, which last he put on the back of the seat,, more behind Maude than himself.
Then he took out a magazine, while Maude watched him furtively, thinking him the finest looking man she had ever seen, except her father, of whom, in his manner, he reminded her a little. Not nearly so old, certainly, as her father, and not young like Archie either, for there were a few threads of grey in his mustache and in his brown hair which had a trick of curling slightly at the ends under his soft felt hat. Who was he? she wondered. The initials on his satchel were “M. G.,” but that told her nothing. How she hoped he was going as far as she was, she felt so safe with him, and at last, as the darkness increased and he shut up his book, she ventured to ask:
“Are you going far?”