First, there was the matter of her leaving home. Ought she to have left at all? And if she should have left, was that the right way to have done it? The whole problem of her life took on a distorted form in the midnight and darkness that it had never presented before. She thought of her friends back in Meadow Brook who had loved her and Aunt Mary. What would they think of her going? Perhaps she should have waited to tell them all, and yet how could she make explanations? It would only bring discredit upon Eugene and Nannette and that she did not want to do. No, she could not have asked her friends, or even have told them good-bye without more explanation than she was ready to give. There was the minister, and Judge Peterson, the Browns and Ridgeways, and a host of others. They never would have let her go alone out into the world without even a destination, and no chance of a job. They would have worked it somehow for her to stay with one of them. She would never have been free, and Eugene and Nannette would have been furious at her making a display of their family quarrels in the town. No, she could have come away in no other manner. And she had to come. She could not have stayed much longer even if she had not started that night. These questions somewhat conquered, her thoughts turned to the first night away from home, the awful experience in the cemetery, and the look on the face of her old friend when she had asked him what he was doing. And now she knew what had been the underlying thorn in her soul that had made the pain ever since. Long ago, perhaps ten years before, when she had been a little girl, there had been a holiday when she and Aunt Mary had started off with a neatly packed luncheon and a handful of books to spend the day in the woods, a long promised, eagerly anticipated excursion. There were chicken sandwiches neatly wrapped in wax paper. How well she remembered helping to make them! And little blackberry turnovers rich with gummy sweetness. Hard-boiled eggs, tiny sweet pickles from the summer’s vintage, sponge cakes, big purple grapes, and a bottle of milk to drink. Plenty of everything. Aunt Mary never stinted a lunch and she always put in enough for a guest if one should turn up. And that day the guest really came.