Her voice was extinguished by the noise of wheels and steam. Luke, exhausted, was compelled to relax his hold. The rest of the carriages passed him with accumulated speed and he watched the train disappear. In his excitement he had advanced far beyond the limits of the platform. He found himself standing in a clump of yellow rag-wort, just behind his own stone-cutter’s shed. He gazed up the track, along which the tantalizing lady had been so inexorably snatched away. The rails had a dull whitish glitter but their look was bleak and grim. They suggested, in their narrow merciless perspective, cutting the pastures in twain, the presence of some remorseless mechanical Will carving its purpose, blindly and pitilessly, out of the innocent waywardness of thoughtless living things. An immense and indefinable foreboding passed, like the insertion of a cold, dead finger, through the heart of the young man. Fantastic and terrible images pursued one another through his agitated brain. He saw his brother lying submerged in Hullaway Pond, while a group of frightened children stood, in white pinafores, stared at him with gaping mouths. He saw himself arriving upon this scene. He even went so far as to repeat to himself the sort of cry that such a sight might naturally draw from his lips, his insatiable dramatic sense making use, in this way, of his very panic, to project its irrepressible puppet-show. His brother’s words, “Young man, I will never forgive you for this,” rose luridly before him. He saw them written along the edge of a certain dark cloud which hung threateningly over the Hullaway horizon. He felt precisely what he would feel when he saw them--luminously phosphorescent--in the indescribable mud and greenish weeds that surrounded his brother’s dead face. A sickening sense of loss and emptiness went shivering through him. He felt as though nothing in the world was of the least importance except the life of James Andersen. With hurried steps he recrossed the line, repassed the turn-stile, and began following the direction taken by his brother just two hours before. Never had the road to Hullaway seemed so long!