Immediately afterwards, as soon as the idea had taken possession of her, she felt the renewal of courage in her thoughts. Once that was settled, she told herself, and there was no turning back, everything would be easier. Just to go away somewhere. It made no difference where the train went. She would go to the very end, the farther the better, as long as her money held out. "I can scrape together almost seventy dollars," she thought. "Besides the fifty I made at the store, I've saved the twenty dollars Nathan and Rose Emily gave me for a wedding present. That much ought to take me somewhere and keep me until I can find something to do." Her father, she realized with a pang, would have to manage without her. Perhaps he would be obliged to mortgage the place again. She hoped he wouldn't have to sell Dan and Beersheba, and she was confident in her heart that he would never do this. He would sooner part with the roof over his head. It would be hard on him; but he had Josiah and Rufus, and after her marriage, it was doubtful if she could have continued to help him. "Josiah may marry too," she reflected, "and of course Rufus is always uncertain." Nobody could tell what Rufus might some day take it into his head to do. Then, because weakness lay in that direction, she turned her resolute gaze toward her own future. There was no help outside herself. She knew that the situation, bad as it was now, would be far worse before it was better. Romantic though she was, she was endowed mentally with a stubborn aptitude for facing facts, for looking at life fearlessly; and now that imagination had done its worst, she set herself to the task of rebuilding her ruined world. All her trouble, she felt, had come to her from trying to make life over into something it was not. Dreams, that was the danger. Like her mother she had tried to find a door in the wall, an escape from the tyranny of things as they are; and like her mother, she had floundered among visions. Even though she was miserable now, her misery was solid ground; her feet were firmly planted among the ancient rocks of experience. She had finished with romance, as she had finished with Jason, for ever. Twisting about on the earth, she pushed aside the branches, and looked down on Old Farm, folded there so peacefully between the road and the orchard. Wreathed in sunlight as pale as cowslips, she saw the house under the yellowing locust trees. Over the roof a few swallows were curving; from a single chimney smoke rose in a column; there was a cascade of shadows down the rocky path to the gate. She saw these blended details, not as she had seen them yesterday or the moment before she had made her decision, but as one looks on a place which one has loved and from which one is parting for ever. A bloom of sentiment and regret coloured the stark outline; and so, she knew, it would remain indelibly softened in her memory.