There was a quick, impatient blast from the engine.  The wheels creaked against the rails.  The train moved forward.

“Good night,” he said.  His hand reached over the railing and one of hers fell into it.  For a moment it lay hidden there, warm and tremulous.  Then his fingers released it and it fled to join its fellow at her breast.

“Good night—­dear,” he said again.  “Remember!”

Then he dropped from the step.  There was a long piercing wail of the whistle that was smothered as the engine entered the snow-shed.  The girl on the platform stood motionless a moment.  Then one of her hands dropped from her breast, and with it came a faded spray of purple lilac.  She stepped quickly to the rail and tossed it back into the twilight.  Wade sprang forward, snatched it from the track and pressed it to his lips.  When the last car dipped into the mouth of the snow-shed he was still standing there, gazing after, his hat in hand, a straight, lithe figure against the starlit sky.

II.

Well down in the southeastern corner of New Hampshire, some twenty miles inland from the sea, lies Eden Village.  Whether the first settlers added the word Village to differentiate it from the garden of the same name I can’t say.  Perhaps when the place first found a name, over two hundred years ago, it was Eden, plain and simple.  Existence there proving conclusively the dissimilarity between it and the original Eden, the New England conscience made itself heard in Town Meeting, and insisted on the addition of the qualifying word Village, lest they appear to be practising deception toward the world at large.  But this is only a theory.  True it is, however, that while Stepping and Tottingham and Little Maynard and all the other settlements around are content to exist without explanatory suffixes, Eden maintains and is everywhere accorded the right to be known as Eden Village.  Even as far away as Redding, a good eight miles distant, where you leave the Boston train, Eden’s prerogative is known and respected.

Wade Herrick discovered this when, five years after our first glimpse of him, he stepped from the express at Redding, and, bag in hand, crossed the station platform and addressed himself to a wise-looking, freckle-faced youth of fourteen occupying the front seat of a rickety carryall.

“How far is it to Eden, son?” asked Wade.

“You mean Eden Village?” responded the boy, leisurely.

“I suppose so.  Are there two Edens around here?”

“Nope; just Eden Village.”

“Well, where is that, how far is it, and how do I get there?”

“About eight miles,” answered the boy.  “I kin take you there.”

Wade viewed the discouraged-looking, flea-bitten gray horse dubiously.  “Are you sure?” he asked.  “Have you ever driven that horse eight miles in one day?”

“Well, I guess!  There ain’t a better horse in town than he is.”