Maurice had been very grateful for his fortnight of absence from everybody, except the Greenleaf heirs; grateful for a solitude of trains and lawyers' offices. Because, in solitude, he could, with entirely hopeless courage, face the future. He was facing it unswervingly the day he reached Chicago, where he was to get some final signatures; he came into the warm lobby of the hotel, glad to escape the rampaging lake wind, and while he was registering the hotel clerk produced the telegrams which had been held for him. The first, from Mr. Weston, "Drop Greenleaf," bewildered him until he read the other, "Eleanor has had an accident." Then he ran his pen through his name, asked for a time-table, and sent a peremptory wire to Mrs. Newbolt saying that he was on his way home, and asking that full particulars be telegraphed to him at a certain point on his journey. "Let me know just what happened, and how she is," he telegraphed. "It must be serious," he thought, "to send for me!" It was hardly an hour before he was on a train for another day of travel, during which he experienced the irritation common to all of us when we receive an alarming dispatch, devoid of details. "Economizing on ten cents! What kind of an 'accident'? How serious is it? When was it? Why didn't they let me know before?" and so on; all the futile, anxious, angry questions which a man asks himself under such circumstances. But suddenly, while he was asking these questions, another question whispered in his mind; a question to which he would not listen, and which he refused to answer; but again and again, over and over, it repeated itself, coming, it seemed, on the rhythmical roll of the wheels--the wheels which were taking him back to Eleanor! "If--if--if--" the wheels hammered out; "_if_ anything happens to Eleanor--"? He never finished that sentence, but the beginning of it actually frightened him. "Am I as low as this?" he said, frantically, "speculating on the possibility of anything happening to her?" But he was not so low as that--he only heard the jar of the wheels: "If--if--if--if--" When he reached the station to which he had told Mrs. Newbolt to reply, he rushed out of the car into the telegraph office, and clutched at the message before the operator could put it into its flimsy brown envelope; as he read it he said under his breath, "Thank God!" It was from Mary Houghton: Accident slight. Slipped into water. All right now except bad cold. Maurice's hand shook as he folded the message and stuffed it into his pocket. He had the sense of having escaped from a terror--the terror of intolerable remorse. For if she had not been "all right," if, instead of just "a bad cold," the dispatch had said "something had happened"!--then, for all the rest of his life he would have had to remember how the wheels had beaten out that terrible refrain: "If--if--if--" So he said, "Thank God."