But at last the moment came; she started,--and as she drew nearer and nearer her goal, her whole body strained forward, as a man dying of thirst strains toward a spring gleaming in the desert distance; once she sighed with that anticipation of relief that is a shiver. Again the monotonous clatter of the wheels beat out the words that all night long over the mountains had grooved themselves into her brain: "Afterward, they will say I had the right to see him." Love, which that one mad hour, nearly three years before, had numbed and paralyzed, was awakening. It was as if a slowly rising torrent, dammed by some immovable barrier, had at last reached the brim,--trembled, hesitated: then leaped in foaming overflow into its old course! She thought of all the things she was going to tell him (but oh, they were so many, so many; how could she say them all?). "'I never was so true as when I was false. I never loved you so much as when I hated you. I never longed for your arms as I did when--' O God, give me time to tell him that! Don't let them find me before I can tell him that. _Don't_ let him have gone back. God, please, _please_ let me find him at the cottage so I can tell him." She was sitting on the plush cushion of the jolting, swaying old car, her hand on the back of the seat in front of her, every muscle tense with readiness to spring to her feet the moment the train stopped. It was still raining when she got off at the little station which had sprung up out of the sand to accommodate a summer population. It was deserted now, and the windows were boarded over. A passer-by, under a dripping umbrella, lounged along the platform and stopped to look at her. "Come down to see cottages?" he inquired. She said no; but could she get a carriage to take her over to Little Beach? He shook his head sympathetically. "A hack? _Here?_ Lord, no! There isn't no depot carriage running at this time of year. You'd ought to have got off at Normans, the station above this, and then you could have drove over; fourteen miles, though. Something of a drive on an evening like this! But Normans is quite a place. They run two depot carriages there all winter and a dozen in summer." "I'll walk," she told him, briefly. "It's more 'an three miles," he warned her; "and it's sheeting down! If I had such a thing as an umbrella, except this one, I'd--"