But, when they’d driven the miles in to the station, the colonel hardly speaking a word to her on the way, they didn’t see anything of Fayte there, either—and Hilda felt sure that the colonel was both disappointed and angry at that. He was angrier still when she openly posted with her own hand the note she had written to Pearse. Then they were checking her trunk; the colonel was having it brought close to the track where it could be loaded as soon as the train pulled in. Some one came hastily around the corner of the building, speaking to her as Miss Van Brunt, lifting his hat—the marshmallow man—the man who had stolen the ride with Maybelle on the way to the dance—the person Maybelle called Gene. In the morning light he looked more hard and objectionable even than she’d thought. His air was furtive. She moved back a step; he followed up, saying hurriedly: “I didn’t mean to be rough last night when you butted in on my game. Of course I took you for Maybelle. How about her? She send me any word? Have her folks found out anything? What’s my chance to see her now?” “What—what’s all this?” Marchbanks pounced on them from around the pile of baggage—he had heard every word. “Stop—wait, Hilda!” The train roared in; her trunk—the only one to go—was hustled aboard. “Hold on!” But she went past him. It was the conductor who helped her up the step, while he shouted “All aboard!” As the train moved out, she looked back to see the two men confronted. The wheels gathered speed. Soon the station was a toy house, those two she’d left beside the track just little vibrating dots—and finally they were out of sight. Thump-thump of the wheels—the swift-flying landscape outside of the windows.... Time—place—were things that wavered, dissolved. She was again the little girl Hilda of nearly twelve years ago, on that journey from New York to Texas; her mother lying ill in a berth the porter had made up; all the people trying to be kind to them, but the Masterses seeming like own folks; Pearse’s mother sitting beside her mother, fanning the sufferer’s pale face, and her Boy-On-The-Train making himself a little girl’s hero. With this came more sense of reality than anything about her held. She could see it and feel it more vividly than she saw the conductor when he came through for her ticket now, or these other people about her in the seats of this other train. Through the long day’s journey, the stopping and starting, the getting on and getting off of passengers at stations, Hilda lived over and over the few short days that Pearse Masters—in the flesh—had occupied in her life; the many long hours that he had been with her mentally. Why he’d always been there. He was one of the fundamental facts of existence—like Uncle Hank.