The first night on the train she slept early and long, fatigued by a day full of tasks, but the second she lay staring at the polished red back of the berth above, her shade drawn up, her smarting eyes conscious of the jabbing flashes of light as they passed through sleeping towns, or straining out over dark, shuddering mysteries of country; planning, wondering, trying to anticipate what life would be like one year, two years, five years from to-night. Where should she be; whom should she know? Should she be alive? Yes, she promised herself, she would be that. The one thing she could not admit was that life might end before she had fought it out. Once she asked herself what Mathilda was doing, for by this time her flight was an old story, the worst of the scene between Ellen and Mathilda was over. But they would be dreadfully unhappy nevertheless, and the pity she could spare to them softened her own sense of wrong. She flashed on the electric light in the berth and looked at her watch. In six hours, had it not been for Victor Hugo, for a little scrawled note written a fifth of a century ago, she would have been meeting Hal Blaydon at the Blythedale platform. And who could say--if she had married Hal and learned the truth afterward--would it have made any difference after all? It was morning when they got beyond Pittsburgh and, sleepless and discouraged, the grey day greeted her dismally. All she was able to see beyond the window were little grimy houses belonging to coal miners--they painted them a deep red or black in those parts, she supposed because all life was accursed. For long distances nothing caught her eye but these colours of Hell borrowed for earthly use. On a high slope, dingy with slag and coal screenings and dust, there was a black, sorry-looking house, where two children were swinging across the cheap frame porch far above the train. They were singing, and it struck her as the oddest thing she had ever witnessed. There were many houses like it on that coal bank. Where there wasn’t coal there was yellow mud. Where there were not either there were piles of rusty iron. She might come to this herself, to ugliness and hunger. She shuddered and darkened the berth, hiding her face from the vision as though it would sear her beauty and put an end to her youth. Hardly a moment later, it seemed, the porter awakened her from a deep sleep. They were in the Pennsylvania station. Moira’s mood changed the moment she stood in the rotunda. The powerful magic of the city stirred her. Had it been raining as only it can rain in New York, had the streets been ice-bound or blistering in mid-summer heat, she would have felt that great surge unabated.