Her faithful lover gazed after her, while she suffered an intense nausea. To think--to think--it should all be coming to this! She had not used her telegraph-blank, and now had forgotten all about it. It was not the simple trickery that discouraged her, but her own future which could find no better outlet than this, could not rise above it apparently, or that she had no heart to make it rise above it. Why couldn’t she interest herself in some one different to Barton? Why did she have to return to him? Why not wait and meet some other--ignore him as before? But no, no; nothing mattered now--no one--it might as well be Barton really as any one, and she would at least make him happy and at the same time solve her own problem. She went out into the train-shed and climbed into her train. Slowly, after the usual pushing and jostling of a crowd, it drew out toward Latonia, that suburban region in which her home lay. As she rode, she thought. “What have I just done? What am I doing?” she kept asking herself as the clacking wheels on the rails fell into a rhythmic dance and the houses of the brown, dry, endless city fled past in a maze. “Severing myself decisively from the past--the happy past--for supposing, once I am married, Arthur should return and want me again--suppose! Suppose!” Below at one place, under a shed, were some market-gardeners disposing of the last remnants of their day’s wares--a sickly, dull life, she thought. Here was Rutgers Avenue, with its line of red street-cars, many wagons and tracks and counter-streams of automobiles--how often had she passed it morning and evening in a shuttle-like way, and how often would, unless she got married! And here, now, was the river flowing smoothly between its banks lined with coal-pockets and wharves--away, away to the huge deep sea which she and Arthur had enjoyed so much. Oh, to be in a small boat and drift out, out into the endless, restless, pathless deep! Somehow the sight of this water, to-night and every night, brought back those evenings in the open with Arthur at Sparrows Point, the long line of dancers in Eckert’s Pavilion, the woods at Atholby, the park, with the dancers in the pavilion--she choked back a sob. Once Arthur had come this way with her on just such an evening as this, pressing her hand and saying how wonderful she was. Oh, Arthur! Arthur! And now Barton was to take his old place again--forever, no doubt. She could not trifle with her life longer in this foolish way, or his. What was the use? But think of it! Yes, it must be--forever now, she told herself. She must marry. Time would be slipping by and she would become too old. It was her only future--marriage. It was the only future she had ever contemplated really, a home, children, the love of some man whom she could love as she loved Arthur. Ah, what a happy home that would have been for her! But now, now----