He was summoned to dinner, where he found the delicacies he especially liked. The plates were liberally filled, all made a pretence at eating, but, at the end, the food remained hardly touched. The forced conversation fell into sudden, disturbing silences. His father sharpened the carving knife twice, which, for shad roe, was scarcely necessary; his mother scolded the servant without cause; even Ellie was affected, and smiled at him with a bright tenderness. He was to leave Ellerton at midnight, when he would be enabled to connect with a western express, and it was arranged for him to spend a last hour at the Club with his father. Ellie and the servant stood upon the pavement, his mother was upstairs in the sewing room... where he entered softly. At the Club the billiard room was dark, the tables shrouded, but from a room at the end of the hall came the murmur of the nightly coon-can players. They seated themselves at a table, and his father ordered beer and cigars. It was the first time that he had acknowledged Anthony to possess the discretion of maturity, and he raised the stein to his lips with the feeling that it was a sacrament of his manhood, an earnest and pledge of his success. The midnight train emerged from the gloom of the station, passed through the outskirts of Ellerton, detached rows of dark dwellings, by the grounds of the Baseball Association, its fence still plastered with the gaudy circus posters, into the dim fields and shining streams. Anthony stood on the last, swinging platform, gazing back at the gloom that enveloped Ellerton, at the place where Hydrangea House was hid by the hills. An acute misery possessed him--the unsettled maimer of his departure from Eliza, her silence, struggled in his thoughts with the attempt to realize the necessity of the course he had adopted to bring about a final and lasting joy. He wondered if Eliza would understand the need for his going; but, assured of her wise sympathy, he felt that she would; and a measure of content settled upon him. The engine swung about a curve, disappearing into the obscurity of a wood. “Eliza,” he cried aloud, “Eliza, be here when I come back to you!” He sat for the greater part of an hour on the deserted platform of the junction, where signal lamps glistened on the steel rails that vanished into the night, into the west, the inscrutable future. The headlight of the massive locomotive flared unexpectedly, whitely upon him; the engine, with a brief glimpse of a sanguinary heart of fire illuminating a sooty human countenance, gleaming, liquid eyeballs, passed and stopped; and Anthony hastily mounted the train. He made his way through the narrow passage of buttoned, red curtains, and found his berth, when he sank into a weary, dreamless sleep. XXIII