how very much better-looking he was than Ina’s husband.  There was something about the manly squareness of his shoulders, as he stood with his back towards her, examining his letters, which made her tremble a little, she could not have told why.  Suddenly he looked up and saw her, and she felt that the color flashed over her face, and was ashamed and angry.  “Why should I do so?” she asked herself.  She made a curt, stiff little bow in response to Anderson’s greeting, and he passed her going out of the office with his letters.  Then she felt distressed.

“I need not have been rude because I was such a little idiot as to blush when a man looked at me,” she told herself.  “It was not his fault.  He has always been lovely to us.”  She reviewed in her mind just her appearance when she had given him that stiff little bow, and she felt almost like crying with vexation.  “Of course he does not care how I bow to him,” she thought, and somehow that thought seemed to give her additional distress, “but, all the same, I should have been at least polite, for he is very much a gentleman.  I think he is much better bred, and he certainly knows much more than Ina’s husband, even if he does only keep a grocery store; but then army officers are not supposed to know much except how to fight.”

The heavy jar of a passing freight train made her look at the post-office clock, and with her usual promptness, although it was fully seven minutes before the train was due, even if it were on time, and she was only about one minute’s walk from the station, she reflected that she must start at once if she were to meet her father.  So she stowed away her letters in her little bag, and fairly ran across the icy slope between the office and the station.  She saw, as she hurried along, a child tumble down, and watched him jump up and run off to make sure he was not hurt.  When she reached the station she did not go in the waiting-room, which seemed close and stuffy, but remained out on the platform.  The sun had set, but the western sky, which was visible from that point, was a clear expanse of rose and violet.  Charlotte stood looking at it, and for a minute she was able to find that standing-point outside her own little life and affairs which exists for the soul.  She did not think any more of the money troubles, of her bowing so stiffly to Mr. Anderson.  She forgot not only her petty worries, but her petty triumphs and pleasures.  She forgot even the exceeding becomingness of a new way in which she had dressed her hair.  She forgot her coat, which she had herself trimmed with fur taken from an old one of her mother’s, and in which her heart delighted.  She forgot her supreme dinner warming on the range-shelf at home.  She forgot the joy she would soon have in seeing her father alight from the train.  The little, young, untrained creature saw and knew for the moment only the eternal that which was and is and shall be, and which the sunset symbolized.  Her young face had a rapt expression looking at it.