The carriage door shut to with a snap, the horses started forward at a brisk pace, and we were off, and I had left school and childhood behind me forever. I did not cry at all, though I felt desperately like it; but the consciousness that Mr. Rutledge looked sharply at me to see how I took it, made me struggle harder to keep back my tears, and seem womanly and composed. In this I succeeded beyond my hopes, and before half an hour had passed, the bracing air of the fine autumn morning, the rapid pace at which we rolled along, and the new delight to my cloistered eyes, of farms, and villages, woods rich in the many colors of the fall, and meadows and uplands basking in its sunshine, made me feel as if I had been months away from school, and as if the melancholy of last night were some strange distant dream. Seventeen never dreamed more fantastic dreams than I did that morning, however, as I leaned back in the carriage and idly watched the gay landscape past which we were hurrying. It was quite a relief to me that my companion, after attending to my comfort in every necessary way, settled himself in his corner of the carriage, and taking a book from his valise, devoted himself to its perusal, and left me to my own thoughts the entire morning. He did not put it up till we reached the town where we were to dine and wait for the cars. Dinner did not prove a very animated meal; my companion, after asking me about school, and whether I felt sorry to leave it, and a few more questions of the same nature (such as people always put to school-girls, and by which they unconsciously give great offence), seemed to consider his conversational duty performed, and fell into a state of abstraction, which made his face look harder and colder than ever; and as I stealthily regarded him from under my eyelashes, some of last night's alarm threatened to return. But I tried to overcome it, and endeavored to reassure myself by remembering how kind he was when I was so much embarrassed, and how well he had helped me through the interview that he might have made so terrible; and that he did not talk to me--why, certainly it was not strange that a gentleman of his age should not have much in common with a girl of mine.