Instantly he was sick with regret.  Of what consequence was the too pronounced blue of her dress in comparison with the light of happiness in her dear face?  How impossible for him to be here for even these few hours without running counter to some cherished illusion or dear habit of speech or manner.

“I tell you it’s time we were going,” Mrs. Morgan appealed, her anxiety returning.

“We have thirty-five minutes yet,” Lindsay said, looking at his watch; but he gathered up the bags and umbrellas and followed as she moved ponderously to the door.

Stella waited until they were out in the hall, and then looked around the room, a poignant tenderness in her eyes.  There was nothing congruous between its shabby walls and cheap worn furniture and her own beautiful young life; but the heart establishes its own relations, and tears rose suddenly to her eyes and fell in quick succession.  Even so brief a farewell was broken in upon by her stepmother’s call, and pressing her wet cheek for a moment against the discolored door-facing, she hurried out to join her.

Lindsay did not at first connect the unusual crowd in and around the little station with his sister’s departure; but the young people at once formed a circle around her, into which one and another older person entered and retired again with about the same expressions of affectionate regret and good wishes.  He had known them all so long!  But, except for the growing up of the younger boys and girls during his five years of absence, they were to him still what they had been since he was a child, affecting him still with the old depressing sense of distance and dislike.  The grammarless speech of the men, the black-rimmed nails of Stella’s schoolmaster—­a good classical scholar, but heedless as he was good-hearted,—­jarred upon him, indeed, with the discomfort of a new experience.  Upon his own slender, erect figure, clothed in poor but well-fitting garments, gentleman was written as plainly as in words, just as idealist was written on his forehead and the other features which thought had chiselled perhaps too finely for his years.

The brightness had come back to Stella’s face, and he could not but feel grateful to the men who had left their shops and dingy little stores to bid her good-by, and to the placid, kindly-faced women ranged along the settees against the wall and conversing in low tones about how she would be missed; but the noisy flock of young people, who with their chorus of expostulations, assurances, and prophecies seemed to make her one of themselves, filled him with strong displeasure.  He knew how foolish it would be for him to show it, but he could get no further in his effort at concealment than a cold silence which was itself significant enough.  A tall youth with bold and handsome features and a pretty girl in a showy red muslin ignored him altogether, with a pride which really quite overmatched his own; but the rest shrank back a little as he passed looking after the checks and tickets, either cutting short their sentences at his approach or missing the point of what they had to say.  The train seemed to him long in coming.