"Oh, Dosia, we must get home again; we must get home!" she cried, starting up so vehemently that the baby in her arms screamed, and Lois walked up and down distractedly hushing him, and then, as he still wailed, sat down once more and bared her white bosom to quiet him. "We shall have to get back; Dosia, we must start at once."
"We shall have to walk to Haledon," said Dosia.
"Yes, yes. Perhaps we may come to some farm-house where they will let us have a wagon. It is seven miles to Haledon—that isn't very far! I often walked five miles with Justin before I was married, and a mile or two more is nothing. There are plenty of trains from Haledon."
"Oh, we can do it easily enough," said Dosia, though her heart was as lead within her breast. "You had better eat some of these biscuits before we start," she advised, taking them out of the bag; and Lois munched them obediently, and drank some tepid water from a pitcher which Dosia had found inside. As she put it back again in its place, she slipped to the side of the platform and looked down the moon-filled, narrow valley.
Through all this journey Dosia had carried double thoughts; her voice called where none might hear. It spoke now as she whispered, with hands outspread:
"Oh, why weren't you in when I went for you? Why didn't you come and take care of us, when I needed you so much? Why did you let us go off this way? You might have known! Why don't you come and take care of us? There's no one to take care of us but you! You could!" A dry sob stopped the words—the deep, inherent cry of womankind to man for help, for succor. She stooped over and picked up an oakleaf that had lain on the ground since the winter, and pressed it to her bosom, and sent it fluttering off on a gust of wind down the incline, as if it could indeed take her message with it, before she went back to Lois.
After some hesitation as to the path,—one led across the rails from where they were sitting,—they finally took that behind the station, which broadened out into a road that lay along the wooded slope above, from which they could look down at intervals and see the track below. One side of that road was bordered by a high wire fencing inclosing pieces of woodland, sometimes so thick as to be impenetrable, while along other stretches there would be glimpsed through the trees some farther, open field. To the right, toward the railway there were only woods and no fencing.
They two walked off briskly at first, but the road was of a heavy, loose, shelving soil in which the foot sank at each step; the grass at the edge was wet with dew and intersected by the ridged, branching roots of trees; the pace grew, perforce, slower and slower still. They took turns in carrying the baby, whose small bundled form began to seem as if weighted with lead.
