Returning home, after Florence had placed the shattering paper within his hand, Noble had changed his shoes and his tie.  He was but a mechanism; he had no motive.  The shoes he put on were no better than those he took off; the fresh tie was no lovelier than the one he had worn; nor had it even the lucidity to be a purple one, as the banner of grief.  No; his action was, if so viewed, “crazy,” as Aunt Fanny had called it.  Agitation first took this form; that was all.  Love and change of dress are so closely allied; and in happier days, when Noble had come home from work and would see Julia in the evening, he usually changed his clothes.  No doubt there is some faint tracery here, probably too indistinct to repay contemplation.

When he left the house he walked rapidly downtown, and toward the end of this one-mile journey he ran; but as he was then approaching the railway station, no one thought him eccentric.  He was, however, for when he entered the station he went to a bench and sat looking upward for more than ten minutes before he rose, went to a ticket window and asked for a time-table.

“What road?” the clerk inquired.

“All points South,” said Noble.

He placed the time-table, still folded, in his pocket, rested an elbow on the brass apron of the window, and would have given himself up to reflections, though urged to move away.  Several people, wishing to buy tickets, had formed a line behind him; they perceived that Noble had nothing more to say to the clerk, and the latter encouraged their protests, even going so far as to inquire:  “For heaven’s sakes, can’t you let these folk buy their tickets?” And since Noble still did not move:  “My gosh, haven’t you got no feet?”

“Feet?  Oh, yes,” said Noble gently.  “I’m going away.”  And went back to his seat.

Afterwhile, he sought to study his time-table.  Ordinarily, his mind was one of those able to decipher and comprehend railway time-tables; he had few gifts, but this was one of them.  It failed him now; so he wandered back to the ticket-window, and, after urgent coaching, eventually took his place at the end instead of at the head of the line that waited there.  In his turn he came again to the window, and departed from it after a conversation with the clerk that left the latter in accord with Aunt Fanny Atwater’s commiserating adjective, though the clerk’s own pity was expressed in argot.  “The poor nut!” he explained to his next client.  “Wants to buy a ticket on a train that don’t pull out until ten thirty-five to-night; and me fillin’ it all out, stampin’ it and everything, what for?  Turned out all his pockets and couldn’t come within eight dollars o’ the price!  Where you want to go?”

Noble went back to his bench and sat there for a long time, though there was no time, long or short, for him.  He was not yet consciously suffering; nor was he thinking at all.  True, he had a dim, persistent impulse to action—­or why should he be at the station?—­but for the clearest expression of his condition it is necessary to borrow a culinary symbol; he was jelling.  But the state of shock was slowly dispersing, while a perception of approaching anguish as slowly increased.  He was beginning to swallow nothing at intervals and the intervals were growing shorter.