She was quite calm, so calm that she found herself thinking that she had forgotten to get an yeast cake for Mary.  “I’ll get it as I go home,” she thought.  But as she stood waiting for the car it occurred to her that she had better think things out before she went home.  Better not see Maurice until she had decided just how she should tell him that there was no use having secrets from her!  That she knew he was seeing Mrs. Dale!  Then he would have to tell her why he was seeing her...  There could be only one reason...  For a moment she was suffocated by that “reason”!  She let the returning car pass, and signaled the one going out into the country; she would go, she told herself, to the end of the route, and by that time she would know what to do.  The car was crowded, but a kindly faced young woman rose and offered her a seat.  Eleanor declined it, although her knees were trembling.

“Oh, do take it!” the woman urged, pleasantly, and Eleanor could not resist sinking into it.

“You are very kind,” she said, smiling faintly.

The woman smiled, too, and said, “Well, I always think what I’d like anyone to do for my mother, if she couldn’t get a seat in a car!  I guess you’re about her age.”

Eleanor hardly heard her; she sat staring out of the window—­staring at that same landscape on which she and Maurice had gazed in the unseeing ecstasy of their fifty-four minutes of married life!  “He said we would come back in fifty years—­not by ourselves.”  As she said that, a thought stabbed her! There was a child that day, in the yard!

When she saw that the car was approaching the end of the route, she thought of the locust tree, and the blossoming grass, and the whispering river.  “I’ll go there, and think,” she said.

“All out!” said the conductor; and she rose and walked, stumbling once or twice, and with one hand outstretched, as if—­in the dazzling July day—­she had to feel her way in an enveloping darkness.  She went down the country road, where the bordering weeds were white with dust, toward that field of young love, and clover, and blue sky.

When she reached the river, curving around the meadow, brown and shallow in the midsummer droughts, she saw that the big locust was long past blossoming, but some elderberry bushes, in full bloom, made the air heavy with acrid perfume; the grass, starred by daisies, and with here and there a clump of black-eyed Susans, was ready for mowing, and was tugging at its anchoring roots, blowing, and bending, and rippling in the wind, just as it had that other day!...  “And I sat right here, by the tree,” she said, “and he lay there—­I remember the exact place.  And he took my hand—­”