There came a touch on her shoulder, as before.  The good woman of the gray bonnet had come forward from her seat farther down the car.

“I’m going to stop presently,” she said, “at East Haverhill; and I should feel more satisfied in my mind if you’d just let me see you easy before I go.  Besides, if you don’t do something quick, the cinder will get so bedded in, and make such an inflammation, that a dozen eyestones wouldn’t draw it out.”

At this terror, poor Elinor yielded, in a negative sort of way.  She ceased to make resistance when her unknown friend, taking the little twist of paper from the hand still fast closed over it with the half-conscious grasp of pain, dexterously unrolled it, and produced the wonderful chalky morsel.

“Now, ‘let’s see, says the blind man;’” and she drew down hand and handkerchief with determined yet gentle touch.  “Wet it in your own mouth,”—­and the eyestone was between Elinor’s lips before she could refuse or be aware.  Then one thumb and finger was held to take it again, while the other made a sudden pinch at the lower eyelid, and, drawing it at the outer corner before it could so much as quiver away again, the little white stone was slid safely under.

“Now ‘wink as much as you please,’ as the man said that took an awful-looking daguerreotype of me once.  Good-by.  Here’s where I get out.  And there they all are to meet me.”  And then, the cars stopping, she made her way, with her carpet-bag and parasol and a great newspaper bundle, gathered up hurriedly from goodness knows where, along the passage, and out upon the platform.

“Why, it’s the strangest thing!  I don’t feel it in the least!  Do you suppose it ever will come out again, Augusta?” cried Elinor, in a tone greatly altered from any in which she had spoken for two hours.

“Of course it will,” cried “Gray-bonnet” from beneath the window.  “Don’t be under the least mite of concern about anything but looking out for it when it does, to keep it against next time.”

Leslie saw the plain, kindly woman surrounded in a minute by half a dozen eager young welcomers and claimants, and a whole history came out in the unreserved exclamations of the few instants for which the train delayed.

“Oh, it’s such a blessing you’ve come!  I don’t know as Emma Jane would have been married at all if you hadn’t!”

“We warn’t sure you’d get the letter.”

“Or as Aunt Nisby would spare you.”

“’Life wanted to come over on his crutches.  He’s just got his new ones, and he gets about first-rate.  But we wouldn’t let him beat himself out for to-morrow.”

“How is ’Life?”

“Hearty as would anyway be consistent—­with one-leggedness.  He’d never ‘a’ got back, we all know, if you hadn’t gone after him.”  It was a young man’s voice that spoke these last sentences, and it grew tender at the end.