"I remember sitting here with your mother, the night you children were lost," Mrs. Richie said. "Oh, Nannie dear, you must move out of this house; it is too gloomy!" But Nannie was not thinking of the house. "Where _can_ she have gone?" she said. Mrs. Richie could offer no suggestion. Her explanation to herself was that Blair and Elizabeth had quarreled, and Elizabeth, in a paroxysm of temper, had rushed off to spend the night in some hotel by herself. But she did not want to say this to Nannie. To herself she said that things did sometimes turn out for the best in this world, after all--if only David could realize it! "She would have made him dreadfully unhappy," Helena Richie thought; "she doesn't know what love means." But alas! David did not know that he had had an escape. She sighed, remembering that talk on the beach, and those wicked things he had said,--things for which she must be in some way to blame. "If he had had a different mother," she thought, heavily, "he might not have--" A sudden shock of terror jarred all through her--_could Elizabeth have gone to David?_ The very thought turned her cold; it was as if some slimy, poisonous thing had touched her. Then common sense came in a wave of relief: "Of course not! Why should she do such an absurd thing?" But in spite of common sense, Helena Richie's lips went dry. "It's a quarter to two," Nannie said. "He hasn't come; she must be at the hotel." "I'm sure she is," Mrs. Richie agreed. "Let's wait five minutes," Nannie said; "but I'm certain it's all right." "Of course it's all right," Mrs. Richie said again, and got on her feet with a shiver of relief. "It gave me a terrible scare," Nannie confessed, and turned out the gas. "I had a perfectly awful thought, Mrs. Richie; a wicked thought. I was afraid she had--had done something to herself. You know she is so crazy when she is angry, and--" The front gate banged. Nannie gave a faint scream. "Oh, Mrs. Richie! Oh--" It was Helena Richie who opened the door before Blair had even reached it. "Well? Well?" "Not there. . . ." CHAPTER XXXVI All night long Elizabeth watched a phantom landscape flit past the window of the sleeping-car. Sometimes a cloud of smoke, shot through with sparks, brushed the glass like a billowing curtain, and sometimes the thunderous darkness of a tunnel swept between her and spectral trees or looming hilltops. She lay there on her pillows, looking at the flying glimmer of the night and drawing long breaths of peace. The steady, rhythmical pounding of the wheels, the dull, rushing roar of the rails, the black, spinning country outside her window, shut away her old world of miseries and shames. Behind the stiff green curtains, that swung in and out, in and out, to the long roll of the car, there were no distractions, no fears of interruption, no listening apprehensions; she could relax into the wordless and exultant certainty of her purpose.