How did it happen that the name which rose to her lips was the name of her native town--a word that she had not uttered since the morning of her awakening in the house of Rose Légère? Perhaps it was because the dead man had, with almost his last words, pleaded with her to go home; perhaps it was because that name, of which she had for so long tried never to think, was, in reality, the one always nearest to her heart; perhaps it was only because no other town was familiar to her. In any event, the name was spoken without consideration of the consequences, and, before she had time to pause or to repent, the clerk had handed her the change, and with it the bit of pasteboard that would bear her home. "There's a boat in ten minutes," he said: "but you'll have to wait an hour in Jersey City. The first train doesn't go till six-five." Of what immediately followed she had, thereafter, no clear recollection. She remembered only buying a cold sandwich and a half-pint of whiskey in a deserted café; crossing a bitterly cold, sullen stretch of water from a twinkling cañon to a shadowy shore; walking, for warmth, weary though she was, up and down, and up and down, along a damp, echoing train-shed, and then, at last, passing a clanging iron gate, climbing into a coach, and falling, nearly stupefied, into an uncomfortable, red-plush covered seat. She had but the faintest mental picture of changing cars, and none at all of any subsequent incident, until, in a black dawn, there flashed upon her, from between the frost-figures on the window, a bit of landscape that warned her she was approaching home. The track came suddenly to the river-side. Beneath a gray sky, which, though the morning was well advanced, the sun seemed afraid to climb, there raced the mile-and-a-half wide strip of gray water. It crashed across a ruined dam; it swept above a submerged "chute" through which, years before, the big pine-rafts from the upper Alleghanies used to be hurled on their way to the Chesapeake. There had been a thaw: only here and there could Mary see the ominous crests of the rocks that threatened the mid-channel; the islands, with trees bare of foliage, were under water, and far away, from the cloudy York County shore, the high hills rose above the mist, dun and cheerless, forbidding and cold. With a quick catch in her throat, she saw the river-road that she had so often tramped on holidays, now axle-deep in mud. Over there were the leafless woods where, when the boughs were green, the children used to picnic, and here, nearer the town, where patches of soiled snow hid under the stunted pines, was the path where one time came, for pink laurel branches, a girl that she had been. The engine whistled sharply and stopped. Mary mechanically readjusted the hat that she had not touched since she had put it on for the work of the evening previous--the evening so long ago. She stepped to the platform.