Eleanor promised. Somehow, Aunt Isobel, with her anxious face and her reddened eyelids, had never seemed so pathetic before.
"I'll write to you, auntie," she said reassuringly; "and you mustn't worry."
"Don't write to me," whispered Miss Isobel tremulously. "Write to mother. Just a line now and then to let her know you think of her. She's quite feeble, Nellie, and she talks about you from morning until night."
Eleanor's face hardened. She evidently did not enjoy imagining the nature of Madam's discourse. However, she squeezed Aunt Isobel's hand and said she would write.
Then Quin arrived with the ticket and the baggage-checks, the train was called, and Eleanor was duly embraced and wept over.
"We won't go through the gates," said Mr. Ranny, with consideration for Miss Isobel's tearful condition. "Quin will get you aboard all right. Good-by, kiddie!"
Eleanor stumbled after Quin with many a backward glance. Both Aunt Isobel and Uncle Ranny seemed to have acquired haloes of kindness and affection, and she felt like a selfish ingrate. She looked at the lunch-box in her hand, and thought of Rose rising at dawn to fix it before she went to work. She remembered the little gifts Cass and Myrna and Edwin had slipped in her bag. How good they had all been to her, and how she was going to miss them! Now that she was actually embarked on her great adventure, a terrible misgiving seized her.
"Train starts in two minutes, boss!" warned the porter, as Quin helped Eleanor aboard and piloted her to her seat.
"You couldn't hold it up for half an hour, could you?" asked Quin. Then, as he glanced down and met Eleanor's eyes brimming with all those recent tendernesses, his carefully practised stoicism received a frightful jolt.
As the "All aboard!" sounded, she clutched his sleeve in sudden panic.
"Oh, Quin, I know I'm going to be horribly lonesome and homesick. I--I wish you were going too!"
"But you can't! I was fooling. You must get off this instant!"
"May I come on later? Say in the spring?"
"Yes, yes! But get off now! Quick, we are moving!"
She had almost to push him down the aisle and off the steps. Then, as the train gained speed, instead of looking forward to the wide fields of freedom stretching before her, she looked wistfully back to the disconsolate figure on the platform, and, with a sigh that was half for him and half for herself, she lifted her fingers to her lips and rashly blew him a good-by kiss.