She was leaving them—­for what?  Honora did not know.  There had been nothing imperative in Cousin Eleanor’s letter.  She need not have gone if she had not wished.  Something within herself, she felt, was impelling her.  And it is curious to relate that, in her mind, going to school had little or nothing to do with her journey.  She had the feeling of faring forth into the world, and she had known all along that it was destined she should.  What was the cause of this longing to break the fetters and fly away? fetters of love, they seemed to her now—­and were.  And the world which she had seen afar, filled with sunlit palaces, seemed very dark and dreary to her to-night.

“The lady’s asking for you, Miss,” said the porter.

She made a heroic attempt to talk to Mrs. Stanley.  But at the sight of Peter’s candy, when she opened it, she was blinded once more.  Dear Peter!  That box was eloquent with the care with which he had studied her slightest desires and caprices.  Marrons glaces, and Langtrys, and certain chocolates which had received the stamp of her approval—­and she could not so much as eat one!  The porter made the berths.  And there had been a time when she had asked nothing more of fate than to travel in a sleeping-car!  Far into the night she lay wide awake, dry-eyed, watching the lamp-lit streets of the little towns they passed, or staring at the cornfields and pastures in the darkness; thinking of the home she had left, perhaps forever, and wondering whether they were sleeping there; picturing them to-morrow at breakfast without her, and Uncle Tom leaving for the bank, Aunt Mary going through the silent rooms alone, and dear old Catherine haunting the little chamber where she had slept for seventeen years—­almost her lifetime.  A hundred vivid scenes of her childhood came back, and familiar objects oddly intruded themselves; the red and green lambrequin on the parlour mantel—­a present many years ago from Cousin Eleanor; the what-not, with its funny curly legs, and the bare spot near the lock on the door of the cake closet in the dining room!

Youth, however, has its recuperative powers.  The next day the excitement of the journey held her, the sight of new cities and a new countryside.  But when she tried to eat the lunch Aunt Mary had so carefully put up, new memories assailed her, and she went with Mrs. Stanley into the dining car.  The September dusk was made lurid by belching steel-furnaces that reddened the heavens; and later, when she went to bed, sharp air and towering contours told her of the mountains.  Mountains which her great-grandfather had crossed on horse back, with that very family silver in his saddle-bags which shone on Aunt Mary’s table.  And then—­she awoke with the light shining in her face, and barely had time to dress before the conductor was calling out “Jersey City.”