“God bless and keep you, darling—­and Pete!” Then he swung up on the last step of the train and left me—­shoved off into a hard, cold world full of luncheons and sight-seeing and dinner-parties and plays and dances and suppers and lights and music and flowers and like miseries.  At the agony of the thought I staggered into the huge waiting-room at the station and sank on one of the benches and closed my eyes to keep the tears from dripping.

At first I just sat dumb and suffering—­reviewing all the wonderful and exciting and magnificent things I had been planning to do for and with Peter and all the rest of my dear friends who were then in New York having the times of their aristocratically rustic lives.  I reminded myself of the shopping excursion Mabel and I were going to make with Edith and Julia on that very day.  The responsibility of Julia’s hats was certainly mine, for I had told her to wait to get them in New York, and she would surely need them immediately in the round of gaieties that had been planned for them all.  Then, who could help being delighted at the thought of seeing Miss Editha and the colonel introduced to one of the follies at the Whiter Garden?  I knew that I would be needed greatly then, and had rather dreaded it; though from Miss Editha’s pink cheeks at the supper-party the night before, as she sipped her champagne I had rather hoped that she was making up her mind to a time of it.  And then the joy of watching united Tolly and Edith!  And Peter, how he would need me to help him to be responsible for all the wonderful things that were going to happen to him right along, now that he was the success of the hour.  Even the papers had begun to speculate that first morning on his “next play.”

“I’m weaving the laurel wreath rapidly now to bind your tresses, am I not, dear, dearest Betty?” he had whispered, as he told me good night at the hotel only a few short hours ago.  Yes, I was needed in life, even if not down in a brier-patch in the Harpeth Valley, Tennessee, and I must bear my honors and responsibilities with as beautiful a spirit as Sam bore his burden of Belgians.  I would have all I could do out in the world, and he would have his life full in the wilderness; but we would be a thousand miles apart.

And just here a very strange thing happened.  From the weak, cowering, sobbing girl on the bench arose a very determined, red-cheeked, executive young woman who walked over to the nearest ticket-office and demanded of the brisk young clerk what time the different trains left for Tennessee.  She found that by going at ten o’clock direct through Cincinnati she could reach Hayesboro two hours ahead of that Belgian emigrant-train that was to go around through Atlanta.  Then she went into the dressing-room and got her wad of money out of her stocking, bought a ticket and a Pullman berth, six magazines, some oranges, and a little traveling powder-puff for the end of her red nose, and seated herself in the train before she woke up and found she was I.