"When is he coming back?" she said, faintly; and the woman said, smiling, "To-morrow, 'm." Elizabeth stood blankly on the door-step. To-morrow? There was not going to be any to-morrow! What should she do? Her plan had been so definite and detailed that this interruption of his absence--a possibility which had not entered into her calculations--threw her into absolute confusion. He was away from home! What could she do? Entirely forgetting the rain, she turned away and walked aimlessly down the street. "They'll know I've come here, and they'll find me before I can see him!" she said to herself, in terror. "I must go somewhere and decide what to do." She went into the nearest hotel and took a room. "I must plan; if I wait until he comes back, they'll find me!" But it was an hour before her plan was made; when it was, she sprang up with the old, tumultuous joyousness. Why, of course! How stupid not to have thought of it at once! She was so entirely oblivious of everything but her own purpose that she would have gone out of the hotel on the moment, had not the clerk checked her with some murmur about "a little charge." Elizabeth blushed to her temples. "Oh, I _beg_ your pardon!" she said. In her mortification she wished that the bill had been twice as large. But when she was out in the rain, hurrying to the station, again she forgot everything except her consuming purpose. In the waiting-room--there were four hours before the train started--the panic thought took possession of her that she might miss him if she went down to the beach. "It's raining, and he may not stay over until to-morrow; he may be coming up this afternoon. But if I stay here they'll come and find me!" She could not face this last alternative. "They'll find me, and I won't be able to tell him; they'll take me home, and he will not have been told!" Sitting on the wooden settee in the ladies' waiting-room, she watched the clock until its gaunt white face blurred before her eyes. How the long hand crawled! Once, in a spasm of fright, she thought that it had stopped, and perhaps she had lost her train!