THE cart drew up at the station with a bounce. Before it had fairly stopped, a large man in the clothes of a working citizen, with the umbrella and bag of a traveler, sprang out and made a rush for the door of the ticket-office.

A lean, brown fellow in riding-trousers, who was dawdling on the platform, stared and laughed.

“Holden, what’s the rush?”

“Good Lord, have I missed it?” gasped the other.

“The train?” Thair yawned. “Twenty minutes early.”

“They told me I’d barely make it!” Holden stared resentfully at the vacant rails.

“H’m. Del Monte,” Thair smiled. “Even the clocks are fast!” He squinted at the sky, soft sapphire-blue.

“Why go up to-day? Wait over, and I’ll show you a bit of a cross-country run.”

“Thanks,” grunted Holden; “I’ve had my money’s worth.” The grunt ended in a grin.

Thair chuckled.

“Well,” Holden demanded impatiently, “how is it over at the house?”

“We-e-ell,”—Thair drawled out the word interminably, while amused recollection crossed his face,—“the rains fell, and the winds blew! I stayed at the club through the worst of it. I was sorry for the women—the young madam and Mrs. Essington. They had to stick it out.”

“You mean Mrs. Budd was so annoyed?” Holden was a little puzzled.

“Annoyed! Oh, Lord, that’s not the word! Cis says ‘upset.’ That’s nearer, only seventeen times more upset than usual! Poor woman, she feels that Julia owes the man some reparation for ‘breaking his neck,’ but marriage seems to her extreme.”

“But what’s the objection? He seems a decent sort of chap.”

“He is; the decentest of his sort; but it’s not the sort madam had hoped for Julia. Money, y’ know, and—well, composers seem a bit out of the way to her. But the girl has too much blood to take—” he smiled quizzically—“what was the ‘correct thing.’”

“I’ve had an idea that this would come about from the first,” said Holden, complacently.

“M’m?” Thair mused, interrogative.

“Mrs. Essington’s been immensely interested in those two young people. Shouldn’t wonder—”

Thair bit off a smile. “Remarkable woman, Mrs. Essington,” he observed.

“That damned train’s spending the night on the switch,” growled Holden. He didn’t look down the track, but over his shoulder at the “Miramar” runabout that had just come into sight around the turn of the drive.

The lady who sat so erect beside the groom was Florence Essington.

Holden looked relieved. Thair indulged in what might be called a mental whistle. He gave one sharp glance at Holden, whose attention was engrossed by the approaching vehicle; then a frank smile and a wave of the hand toward the lady—a salute she returned in kind. The approaching train hurried their greetings and farewells, but in that short time he got an impression of a more obvious sophistication, a more pronounced worldliness in her than he had recalled.

Her gown, black with dashes of white, suggested the last and finest flight of fashion; her manner, the latest, most charming importation; her very movement, a consciousness of the keen eye of the world.

While he pondered whether these differences did not merely enhance the beauty of her shadowed eyes, her black and white glimmered through the door of the car. Holden waved his hand from the step and followed her.

Thair wandered down the platform toward where the groom held his uneasy mount.

“That’s a match,” he muttered. “She’ll take him. That’s what she means. She’s wise. Great woman! If a man were fool enough—h’m, h’m!” He nodded to the groom.

Holden, having established his bags in a seat near the door, took the chair next Florence.

She was merry, full of twisted phrases, making him laugh in spite of his impatience.

“I believe,” he told her, half in earnest, “it’s because you’ve fetched that engagement you’re in such spirits.”

“Oh, do you think me a match-maker?” she laughed.

“Well, I wish you’d be one for yourself,” he said bluntly.

Florence bit her lip. She was hating to face what she knew she finally must.

“Don’t you remember,” he went on, “a few days ago you said you would have something to tell me on our way back to town?”

A few days ago! Could it be possible! She looked out of the window. Past rushed a stream of black oaks pricked through with flashes of sea.

She knew what she would answer. She had turned it over for twenty-four hours. She had not dreamed how hard it would be to utter. His kindly eyes were bent upon her with a steady patience, but his blunt fingers drummed the arm of her chair.

“I tried then to make you see,” she began, “that I wasn’t merely putting you off. I didn’t know then just what I could say—how much I was fit for what you ask of me.” She supported his look. “Now I am sure I am not.”

He waved away her objection with his large, open hand. “Are you the judge of that?”

“Who else? Do you think I could take without giving? If I loved you it would be different.”

“Yes. Well—I hardly hoped that, after what you said the other day,” he answered sturdily; “but we are no longer children; I would not ask too much of you. You are a woman of wide interests, and my life takes me so much among people, manipulations of men as well as things, you might—”

She took it up. “Yes, if I could give your interests all my interest, all my energy, my thought, as I might have done once, as I would now, gladly, if I could. But I can’t. I have used up such power as I had. I’ve done all I can do in other people’s interests. Now my interests will be scattered. My ways are already fixed. You offer me an active life in the world, but I am through my activities.”

“Good Heaven!” he broke out; “why, you talk as if you were old—you, with the best of your life before you!”

Her smile was tight. “Perhaps I have lived through things too quickly. But I know I like you too much to cheat you, which I should do if I married you. I can’t—can’t do it! Believe me, I would like to give you what you ask, but I haven’t it.”

“Is this the last word?” he said, half risen.

She nodded, her eyes full of tears.

He saw them, and touched her arm. “Don’t, don’t!” he said gently. “I suppose you know what is best for you!” The accent fell on the last word sadly. He rose; she saw him, a dim bulk on the light window-square as he stooped to gather up bags and umbrella; saw him passing her. The door closed behind him.

Florence, with a shiver, relaxed from her tension, leaning back in her chair a little weakly. Her eyes closed. All the glitter she had shown them on the platform had fallen away from her; and thus, with shut eyes, her unlighted face showed exhaustion so deep that peace seemed the next thing to it. The noise of the train swam heavily in her head. She had no thoughts, only—as now and again she opened her eyes—a vague noticing of small things; and then at sight of green onion-fields wheeling past the window, a sad stab of memory. She shut her eyes, lest some other sight remind her too cruelly of what was left behind. She did not sleep. She was unconscious of time in her deep, complete lethargy of soul and brain. When she opened her eyes again the lights were swinging down the middle of the car, and through the windows she looked out over water, beautiful violet-blue in a softly gathering dark. The train was puffing slower, and now a glimmering succession of windows shut out the water.

The dark tunnel of the ferry-house encompassed her, but the memory of the purple flash of sea lingered with a vivid pleasure—more vivid that the glimpse had been so short—as she followed the rush out of the car door. The cool, soft wind on her face, the crowd tearing to and fro, roused her. The “overland” was just pulling out; a string of electric lights, white jackets jumping to the platforms, faces peering from the windows, it passed her. She felt a queer throb, a wish to be going with it somewhere, outward bound. What had she to hold her anywhere? But even with the thought the sense of poignant personal loss would not rise up before her. Her lethargy was lost, but her consciousness, no longer concentrated upon herself, was relaxed to a keener perception of her surroundings—of the high, dusky-vaulted ferry-house, echoing full of voices and footsteps; of the fitful play of light on the foam churning through the tall piles of the ferry-slip; of the crowd she moved among, streaming down the ferry gangway, a succession of faces glimmering past, each stamped with its headlong personal object. They were still spurred and ridden by it, while she.... The salt breath of the sea rushed up to meet her, with suggestion of the immensities of oceans.

She found an outside seat forward.

It was an evening clear, moonless, with a marvelous purple over water and sky. Every light of the ships in harbor was reflected, a trailing glory, in the glassy bay; and the ferry was plowing through them, with its dull, monotonous pulse like the beat of a heart. The white bulk of a steamer moved directly before its course, white lights, green, red lights—the Nippon Maru outward bound. Florence’s eyes followed it. And there stirred faintly in her the passion she had always cherished for the mysterious other side of the world—Japan, and that great continent beyond it. And as the immensity unrolled before her—the thousands of miles, the millions of people with passions identical, with ideals unintelligible to hers, but in the great sum of existence as necessary—the vast, varied face of the world diminished, dwarfed her own identity.

She had one of those fortunate moments when, the body being very weary, the spirit takes its opportunity and mounts beyond the body’s demands. If she had put it to herself, she would have said she had “got outside of things.” It floated before her, more like an impression than a thought, that to have had one’s happiness was what counted, though it passed like the glimpse of purple sea. And the eye of the soul that could catch it, could treasure it up to carry into some dim, empty, echoing time-to-come. The time of activity, of struggle for what was most desirable, most beautiful, or most necessary to life—the delights, the sufferings, the defeating, the half successes—this time inevitably was ended. Sometimes the change life made was death, sometimes only another face of life, as now it came to her—a time of waiting, of watching, of trying to perceive and understand, from the passionate, personal motives acting themselves out around her, the great intention of the whole.

Before her the lights of the city were all alive, trailing around the water-front, marching over the hills, ringing them with fire, and trembling away into the large stars of the low, soft sky. Her hand was on the rail, and she dropped her chin upon it, looking longingly, searchingly into the heart of the glittering tangle, as if it were the veritable tangle of life.