Nearly two months had passed since that dreadful day when David Richie had gone to his mother to be comforted. In his journey back across the mountains his mind and body were tense with anticipation of the letter which he was confident was awaiting him in Philadelphia. He was too restless to lie down in his berth. Once he went into the day coach and wandered up and down the aisle between the rows of huddled and uncomfortable humanity. Sometimes a sleepy passenger, hunched up on a plush seat, would swear at him for jostling a protruding foot, and once a drearily crying baby, propped against a fat and sleeping mother, clutched with dirty fingers at his coat. At that little feeble pull he stopped and looked down at the small, wabbling head, then bent over and lifted the child, straightening its rumpled clothes and cuddling it against his shoulder. The baby gurgled softly in his ear--and instantly he remembered the baby he had seen on the raft the night that he first knew he was in love with Elizabeth. When he went back to the smoking-compartment and sat down, his hands deep in his pockets, his head sunk between his shoulders, his hat pulled down over his eyes, he thought of that raft baby and wondered if it were alive. But such thoughts were only in the moments when his bruised mind could not steady itself on what had happened to him. Most of the time he was saying, over and over, just what he was going to do the next morning: he would get into the station; take a cab; drive to the hospital--a dozen times that night his thumb and finger sought his waistcoat pocket for a bill to hasten the driver of that cab! leap out, run up the stairs to the mail-rack beside the receiving clerk's desk, seize Elizabeth's letter--here the pause would come, the moment when his body relaxed, and something seemed to melt within him: suppose the letter was not there? Very well: back to the cab! another tip; hurry! hurry! hurry! His mother's house, the steps, his key in the lock--again and again his fingers closed on the key-ring in his pocket! letters on the hall table awaiting him--_her_ letter. Then again the relaxing shock: suppose it was not there? The thought turned him sick; after the almost physical recoil from it, came brief moments of longing for his mother's tender arms, or the remembrance of that baby on the raft. But almost immediately his mind would return to the treadmill of expectation; get into the station--take a cab--rush--So it went, on and on, until, toward dawn, through sheer exhaustion he slept.