Over and over the sorrowful round Cornelia’s thoughts went as mile after mile rushed away under the wheels and home drew nearer. Now and then she thought a little of how it would be when she got home; but when one had to visualize an entirely new home about which one had not heard a thing, not even in what part of the city it was located, how could one anticipate a home-coming? They must have just moved, she supposed, and probably mother had worked too hard settling. Mother always did that. Indeed, Cornelia had been so entirely away from home during her college life that she was almost out of harmony with it, and her sole connection had been gay little letters mostly filled with what she was going to do when she finished her course and became an interior decorator. It was almost two years since she had been at home, for last summer and the summer before she had spent in taking special courses in a summer school not far from her college, and the intervening Christmas she had been invited to a wonderful house party in New York at the home of one of her classmates who had unlimited money and knew just how to give her friends a good time. Mother had thought these opportunities too good to be wasted, and to her surprise father also had been quite willing for her to spend the extra time and money, and so she had grown quite away from the home and its habits. She began to feel, as she drew nearer and nearer to the home city, almost as if she were going among strangers. It was growing quite dusky, and lights were glinting out in stray farmhouses along the way. The train was due in the city at seven o’clock. It was almost six, and the box of fudge that the girls had supplied her with had palled upon her. Somehow she did not feel hungry, only sick at heart and woefully homesick for the college, and the ripple of laughter and chatter down the corridors; the jokes about college fish, and rice pudding; the dear, funny interchange of confidences; even the themes that had to be written! How gladly would she go back now and never grumble about anything if she only knew she could finish without an interruption, and then to the city to take bachelor apartments with Mable and Alice as they had planned, and get into big work! O the dreams, the bubbles that were being broken with all their pretty glitter of rainbow hues gone into nothingness! O the drab monotony of simple home life! So her thoughts beat restlessly through her brain, and drove the tears into her smarting eyes.