Then it was Uncle Tom’s turn.  He gave her his usual vigorous hug and kiss.

“It won’t be long until Christmas,” he whispered, and was gone, helping Aunt Mary off the train, which had begun to move.

Peter remained a moment.

“Good-by, Honora.  I’ll write to you often and let you know how they are.  And perhaps—­you’ll send me a letter once in a while.”

“Oh, Peter, I will,” she cried.  “I can’t bear to leave you—­I didn’t think it would be so hard—­”

He held out his hand, but she ignored it.  Before he realized what had happened to him she had drawn his face to hers, kissed it, and was pushing him off the train.  Then she watched from the, platform the three receding figures in the yellow smoky light until the car slipped out from under the roof into the blackness of the night.  Some faint, premonitory divination of what they represented of immutable love in a changing, heedless, selfish world came to her; rocks to which one might cling, successful or failing, happy or unhappy.  For unconsciously she thought of them, all three, as one, a human trinity in which her faith had never been betrayed.  She felt a warm moisture on her cheeks, and realized that she was crying with the first real sorrow of her life.

She was leaving them—­for what?  Honora did not know.  There had been nothing imperative in Cousin Eleanor’s letter.  She need not have gone if she had not wished.  Something within herself, she felt, was impelling her.  And it is curious to relate that, in her mind, going to school had little or nothing to do with her journey.  She had the feeling of faring forth into the world, and she had known all along that it was destined she should.  What was the cause of this longing to break the fetters and fly away? fetters of love, they seemed to her now—­and were.  And the world which she had seen afar, filled with sunlit palaces, seemed very dark and dreary to her to-night.

“The lady’s asking for you, Miss,” said the porter.

She made a heroic attempt to talk to Mrs. Stanley.  But at the sight of Peter’s candy, when she opened it, she was blinded once more.  Dear Peter!  That box was eloquent with the care with which he had studied her slightest desires and caprices.  Marrons glaces, and Langtrys, and certain chocolates which had received the stamp of her approval—­and she could not so much as eat one!  The porter made the berths.  And there had been a time when she had asked nothing more of fate than to travel in a sleeping-car!  Far into the night she lay wide awake, dry-eyed, watching the lamp-lit streets of the little towns they passed, or staring at the cornfields and pastures in the darkness; thinking of the home she had left, perhaps forever, and wondering whether they were sleeping there; picturing them to-morrow at breakfast without her, and Uncle Tom leaving for the bank, Aunt Mary going through the silent rooms alone, and dear old Catherine haunting the little chamber where she had slept for seventeen years—­almost her lifetime.  A hundred vivid scenes of her childhood came back, and familiar objects oddly intruded themselves; the red and green lambrequin on the parlour mantel—­a present many years ago from Cousin Eleanor; the what-not, with its funny curly legs, and the bare spot near the lock on the door of the cake closet in the dining room!