It was hardly an hour before he was on a train for another day of travel, during which he experienced the irritation common to all of us when we receive an alarming dispatch, devoid of details.  “Economizing on ten cents!  What kind of an ‘accident’?  How serious is it?  When was it?  Why didn’t they let me know before?” and so on; all the futile, anxious, angry questions which a man asks himself under such circumstances.  But suddenly, while he was asking these questions, another question whispered in his mind; a question to which he would not listen, and which he refused to answer; but again and again, over and over, it repeated itself, coming, it seemed, on the rhythmical roll of the wheels—­the wheels which were taking him back to Eleanor!  “If—­if—­if—­” the wheels hammered out; “if anything happens to Eleanor—­“?  He never finished that sentence, but the beginning of it actually frightened him.  “Am I as low as this?” he said, frantically, “speculating on the possibility of anything happening to her?” But he was not so low as that—­he only heard the jar of the wheels:  “If—­if—­if—­if—­”

When he reached the station to which he had told Mrs. Newbolt to reply, he rushed out of the car into the telegraph office, and clutched at the message before the operator could put it into its flimsy brown envelope; as he read it he said under his breath, “Thank God!” It was from Mary Houghton: 

Accident slight.  Slipped into water.  All right now except bad cold.

Maurice’s hand shook as he folded the message and stuffed it into his pocket.  He had the sense of having escaped from a terror—­the terror of intolerable remorse.  For if she had not been “all right,” if, instead of just “a bad cold,” the dispatch had said “something had happened"!—­then, for all the rest of his life he would have had to remember how the wheels had beaten out that terrible refrain:  “If—­if—­if—­”

So he said, “Thank God.”

All that day, while Maurice was hurrying back to Mercer, Eleanor lay very still, and when Mrs. Newbolt or Mrs. Houghton came into the room she closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep.  Edith did not come into the room; so, in a hazy way, Eleanor took it for granted that she had left the house.  “I should think she would!” Eleanor thought; “she could hardly have the face to stay in the same house with me.”  But she did not think much about Edith; she was absorbed in deciding what she should say to Maurice.  Should she tell him the truth?—­or some silly story of a walk to their meadow?  The two alternatives flew back and forth in her mind like shuttlecocks.  There was one thing she felt sure of:  that letter—­which Mrs. Houghton had brought from her desk, which Maurice was to have read when she had done what she set out to do, but which now she kept clutched in her hand, or hidden under her pillow—­Maurice must not see that letter! If he read it, now, while she was (she told herself) still half sick from those drenched