“Oh, what is the matter?” said Mrs. Gibbons, as Mr. Worthington returned with several men from investigation.
“Oh, nothing to speak of; there’s a fire ahead somewhere, and we’re blocked for a few minutes. Mrs. Gibbons—Madam! Pray keep your seat, you can not get out!”
“They do say as there’s a family yet in the burning house,” suggested a sympathizing listener.
“Naw, they got thim out, but there’s two firemen hurted,” said another.
“What is it, Amelia!” Mr. Worthington turned his attention hastily from Mrs. Gibbons to his wife. “Do you feel faint?”
“A little,” murmured Mrs. Worthington, reproachfully.
Mrs. Gibbons had a sickened feeling. She could have felt faint too, if her husband had been along to sit down by her solicitously, and tell her to lean on him. She would have liked to feel faint. But instead, she was forced, in common decency, to be solicitous too for Mrs. Worthington, although she had begun to hate her. Mr. Worthington looked nervously at his watch until the train started again, and when they got out to walk to the ferry, he hurried his wife along at a pace with which Mrs. Gibbons tried in vain to keep up over the uneven, dirty, dimly lighted pavements in those winding streets near the river. Arnold never let her walk so fast that way; she owned an ankle that had once been sprained, and sometimes now turned under her disastrously. But hurry as she might, they hurried faster, under the impulse of the new fear which made itself felt to her without the need of words. She caught up to the couple, and clutched them as they stood suddenly motionless, inside the ferry-house, facing her.
“What do you stop for? Why don’t you go on?” she demanded fiercely, although she knew too well what the dread answer must be. The supreme stroke of suburban fate had befallen them. They had missed the last train out!
Only the initiated know what this really means. To be cut off inexorably from home, and the children, and the fires, and the incompetent servants or the anxious watchers—it is something subtly feared in every evening journey into town, but only once in a life-time perhaps is it experienced.
“We had better go to a hotel,” said Mrs. Worthington, with agitation. “We will have to go to a hotel, Foster.”