The wheels turned faster and faster, along serpentine windings the train made its way downward from the uplands, the mountains took on gentler curves and receded into the distance. The level was reached, and Edgar gave one final glance backward. There were the mountains like blue shadows, remote and inaccessible. And to Edgar it was as though his childhood were reposing up there where they lightly merged with the misty heavens. CHAPTER XIV DARKNESS AND CONFUSION When the train pulled into the station at Bains, the street lamps were already lit, and though the station was bright with its red and white and green signals, Edgar unexpectedly felt a dread of the approaching night. In the daytime he would still have been confident. People would have been thronging the streets, and you could sit down on a bench and rest, or look into the shop windows. But how would he be able to stand it when the people had all withdrawn into their homes and gone to bed for a night's peaceful sleep while he, conscious of wrongdoing, wandered about alone in a strange city? Just to have a roof over his head, not to spend another moment under the open heavens! That was his one distinct feeling. He hurried along the familiar way without looking to right or left until he reached his grandmother's villa. It was on a beautiful, broad avenue, placed, not free to the gaze of passersby but behind the vines and shrubbery and ivy of a well-kept garden, a gleam behind a cloud of green, a white, old-fashioned, friendly house. Edgar peeped through the iron grill like a stranger. No sound came from within and the windows were closed. Evidently the family and guests were in the garden behind the house. Edgar was about to pull the door-bell when something odd occurred. Suddenly the thing that only a few hours before had seemed quite natural to him had now become impossible. How was he to go into the house, how meet his grandmother and her family, how endure all the questions they would besiege him with, and how answer them? How would he be able to bear the looks they would give him when he would tell, as he would be obliged to, that he had run away from his mother? And, above all, how would he explain his monstrous deed, which he himself no longer understood? A door in the house slammed, and Edgar, in a sudden panic at being detected, ran off. When he reached the park he paused. It was dark there, and he expected to find it empty and thought it would be a good place to sit down in and rest and at last reflect quietly and come to some understanding with himself about his fate. He passed through the gateway timidly. A few lamps were burning near the entrance, giving the young leaves on the trees a ghostly gleam of transparent green, but deeper in the park, down the hill, everything lay like a single, black, fermenting mass in the darkness.