“I always ask,” her friend remarked, with decision.

When the train stopped, Mrs. Field inquired of a brakeman.  She was hardly satisfied with his affirmative answer.  “Are you the conductor?” said she, sternly peering.

The young fellow gave a hurried wave of his hand toward the conductor, “There he is, ma’am.”

Mrs. Field asked him also, then she hoisted herself into the car.  When she had taken her seat, she put the same question to a woman in front of her.

It was a five-hours’ ride to Boston.  Mrs. Field sat all the while in her place with her bag in her lap, and never stirred.  There was a look of rigid preparation about her, as if all her muscles were strained for an instant leap.

Two young girls in an opposite seat noticed her and tittered.  They had considerable merriment over her, twisting their pretty silly faces, and rolling their blue eyes in her direction, and then averting them with soft repressed chuckles.

Occasionally Mrs. Field looked over at them, thought of her Lois, and noted their merriment gravely.  She never dreamed that they were laughing at her.  If she had, she would not have considered it twice.

It was four o’clock when Mrs. Field arrived in Boston.  She had been in the city but once before, when she was a young girl.  Still she set out with no hesitation to walk across the city to the depot where she must take the cars for Elliot.  She could not afford a carriage, and she would not trust herself in a street car.  She knew her own head and her old muscles; she could allow for their limitations, and preferred to rely upon them.

Every few steps she stopped and asked a question as to her route, listening sharply to the reply.  Then she went straight enough, speeding between the informers like guide-posts.  This old provincial threaded the city streets as unappreciatively as she had that morning the country one.  Once in a while the magnificence of some shop window, a dark flash of jet, or a flutter of lace on a woman’s dress caught her eye, but she did not see it.  She had nothing in common with anything of that kind; she had to do with the primal facts of life.  Coming as she was out of the country quiet, she was quite unmoved by the thundering rush of the city streets.  She might have been deaf and blind for all the impression it had upon her.  Her own nature had grown so intense that it apparently had emanations, and surrounded her with an atmosphere of her own impenetrable to the world.

It was nearly five o’clock when she reached her station, and the train was ready.  It was half-past five when she arrived in Elliot.  She got off the train and stalked, as if with a definite object, around the depot platform.  She did not for one second hesitate or falter.  She went up to a man who was loading some trunks on a wagon, and asked him to direct her to Lawyer Tuxbury’s office.  Her voice was so abrupt and harsh that the man started.