“I will go and send her to you,” said
Halleck.
At Pittsburg the Squire was eager for his breakfast,
and made amends for his fast of the day before.
He ate grossly of the heterogeneous abundance of the
railroad restaurant, and drank two cups of coffee that
in his thin, native air would have disordered his
pulse for a week. But he resumed his journey
with a tranquil strength that seemed the physical expression
of a mind clear and content. He was willing and
even anxious to tell Halleck what his theories and
plans were; but the young man shrank from knowing
them. He wished only to know whether Marcia were
privy to them, and this, too, he shrank from knowing.
They left Pittsburg under the dun pall of smoke that
hangs perpetually over the city, and ran out of a
world where the earth seemed turned to slag and cinders,
and the coal grime blackened even the sheathing from
which the young leaves were unfolding their vivid
green. Their train twisted along the banks of
the Ohio, and gave them now and then a reach of the
stream, forgetful of all the noisy traffic that once
fretted its waters, and losing itself in almost primitive
wildness among its softly rounded hills. It is
a beautiful land, and it had, even to their loath
eyes, a charm that touched their hearts. They
were on the borders of the illimitable West, whose
lands stretch like a sea beyond the hilly Ohio shore;
but as yet this vastness, which appalls and wearies
all but the born Westerner, had not burst upon them;
they were still among heights and hollows, and in a
milder and softer New England.
“I have a strange feeling about this journey,”
said Marcia, turning from the window at last, and
facing Halleck on the opposite seat. “I
want it to be over, and yet I am glad of every little
stop. I feel like some one that has been called
to a death-bed, and is hurrying on and holding back
with all her might, at the same time. I shall
have no peace till I am there, and then shall I have
peace?” She fixed her eyes imploringly on his.
“Say something to me, if you can! What
do you think?”
“Whether you will—succeed?”
He was confounding what he knew of her father’s
feeling with what he had feared of hers.
“Do you mean about the lawsuit? I don’t
care for that! Do you think he will hate me when
he sees me? Do you think he will believe me when
I tell him that I never meant to leave him, and that
I’m sorry for what I did to drive him away?”
She seemed to expect him to answer, and he answered
as well as he could: “He ought to believe
that,—yes, he must believe it.”
