Brought up until six years old with a frail, invalid mother, and since then by a student father, the child had early learned to keep herself to herself with severe decision. And keep herself hid according to her own ideas, Cherry feared she could not, if she was at hand to see Magnus Kindred go. Besides--Magnus himself had not asked her! "But why will you not stay, Cherry?" the girls persisted. "It does not matter why, you know, so long as I am going," said wise Cherry, and so she put on her sun-bonnet, and went back with steady steps toward her own gate, so soon as tea was over. To be sure, Magnus did see her and come bounding after; and, to be sure, she found out then that she was not really in such haste as she had thought: but still Magnus would never have got the sort of farewell he did, if he had not been saucy and taken it. Though, alas! I am afraid his after-memory of the parting was for a time less tender and true than hers. So there were only the three home faces about the boy that last morning, and only the three sore hearts to plan and prepare his breakfast and every other possible sort of ministration. And magnate as he was, Charlemagne found those three as much as he could bear. III THE NIGHT EXPRESS Just in the grey of the dawn, as the mists uprose from the meadow, There was a stir and a sound in the slumbering village of Plymouth; Clanging and clicking of arms, and the order imperative, "Forward!" --LONGFELLOW. I do not see why the march of improvement should tread down sentiment and tread out romance; but such seems to be the fact. Beauty and feeling, like very birds of the wildwood, take wing and flee at the shriek of the steam-whistle. Your public conveyance is no longer a kindly, easy-going personality, the "Highflyer" or the "Dashaway" mail-coach; it is only the 6.30 train. You could turn and wave a good-bye, in the olden time; gazing back at the dear home outlines until, in the pathetic words of David Copperfield, "the sky was empty." But now, even if the railway does not graze your front dooryard, and you must walk or drive to the station, yet you hardly dare glance round you as you go, lest you should miss the train. For that distant dark line with its trail of silver smoke, which comes snaking along across the country, makes no account of you as an individual, and is equally ready to run you down or to pick you up; and will sooner do either than wait. Magnus was to report at West Point on a certain specified day, and his setting out had been timed accordingly: and now the terror of being late, and so belated, was upon them all. They hurried him off after the five-o'clock breakfast; kissing him, crying over him indeed, but pushing him out of the house. And Mrs. Kindred would not go with him to the station nor let the girls; Magnus could walk so much faster alone, or even run, if need be; and they might make him loiter.