“Oh, if I could only fly back!” she groaned. “I don’t see how I can wait—I don’t see how I can wait! Oh, why did I come?”
“Perhaps there is a train before the one you spoke of,” said Dosia, with the terribly self-accusing feeling now that she ought to have prevented the expedition at the beginning. She got up to go into the little box of a house, in search of a time-table. As she passed the tall post that held the light, she saw tacked on it a paper, and read aloud the words written on it below the date:
NOTICE
NO TRAINS WILL RUN ON THIS ROAD TO-NIGHT
AFTER 8.30 P.M., ON ACCOUNT OF REPAIRS
Dosia and Lois looked at each other with the blankness of despair—the frantic, forlornly heroic impulse, uncalculating of circumstances, began to show itself in all its piteous woman-folly.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Only fifty miles from a great city, the little station seemed like the typical lodge in a wilderness; as far as one could see up or down the track, on either side were wooded hills. A vast silence seemed to be gathering from unseen fastnesses, to halt in this spot.
There were no houses and no light to be seen anywhere, except that one swinging on the pole above, and the moon which was just rising. It was, in fact, one of those places which consist of the far, back-lying acres of the great country-owners, and which seem to the casual traveler forgotten or unknown in their extent and apparently primitive condition. The other railroad, six or seven miles away, went past the country towns and the façaded mansions and the conventional horticultural grounds of the possessors of these uncultivated tracts of woodland.
To the women sitting on the bench, wrapped around by the loneliness and the intense stillness of the oncoming night, the whole expedition appeared at last unveiled in all its grim betrayal. While Lois had been exaltedly imaginative, had resolved so desperately, had acted so daringly, there had never been, from the inception of the scheme, any chance that it could succeed. For the first time since Lois had left home, a wild seething anxiety for Justin possessed her. How could she have left him? She must go back to him at once!