But there had been so many things to do, and Mother had only just gone! She couldn’t think of everything at once.

Then she saw the moving truck stop in front of the house, and she hurriedly put on her hat. Her heart was beating wildly. This was the last minute that she had anticipated so many times during the days since they had decided on this trip. This was the moment when she had hoped to go forth so happily on a real adventure! And now her young soul shrank back. How she dreaded it. How she was going to suffer all through this thing that had been meant to be a pleasure.

Then she opened the door for the mover, and he soon cleared the room of everything.

When he was gone she gave one last desperate look around the devastated room, and then with a quick motion took the key from the inside of the door, slipped it into the outer lock, stepped out, and closed the door sharply, turning the key with finality.

She had already set her suitcases outside, and now she took them and hastily marched down the path and out on the sidewalk, hurrying toward the corner where the trolley would be stopping soon. She was thankful there was no one in sight. She could not bear the thought of prying, curious eyes. She wanted this last act over quickly. She must not go away in a deluge of tears.

There was no one in the trolley whom she knew even by sight except an old woman who did some scrubbing at the high school, and she was sitting wearily looking out the window with a lack of interest in her face. She wasn’t looking toward Rose. Their ways had never crossed, even casually. Rose had only seen her on her hands and knees scrubbing the cafeteria in the high school building. She drew a long breath. She didn’t want anybody to be looking curiously at her now, when she was leaving all the things that were known and dear to her. But she had no realization that scarcely anyone, even the neighbors, would have recognized her in her new blue suit and hat, with the handsome new coat over her arm, its lovely silver-flecked fur collar glorifying her whole outfit. She wasn’t thinking about her new clothes now. All the joy of them was gone, now that the mother who had planned for them and selected them was not there to enjoy seeing her in them. She was only thinking of the great pain in her heart, and the heaviness of having to go out alone. Praying that she might go bravely, as befitted the daughter of the mother who had planned all this for her.

She left her suitcases at the station in care of the old station-master whom she had known since she was a little girl. He had arranged about her ticket to New York and told her about the trains.

She went across the street to the little real estate office where they paid their rent, to leave the key of their apartment, and then she came back to the station and sat down drearily on the bench that ran across the front of the building. There was no one about there with whom she could claim any degree of intimacy, although there were a number whose names she knew, and where they lived and what was their general station in life. But they had probably never heard of her, nor even seen her to notice her, except as she might have passed them on her way from school in a group of girls.

The conductor helped her lift her suitcases onto the train, and she dropped into the seat nearest the door. It wasn’t far to the city where she would get her New York train. She didn’t care where she sat.

But then she looked out the window, catching her last glimpses of the post office, the grocery stores, the drugstore, the little shoe shop where she had had her shoes mended so often, the garage, the church spires in the distance among the trees, the college on the hill, and lastly, as the train gathered full speed and swept around the curve out of town, the big stone high school where she had gone so regularly. She might never see it again. Would she miss it? Although it was nearly two years since she had graduated, it still seemed closely associated with her life, the background of all her contacts with young people her age.

There were the new tennis courts. There were people playing on them now. She couldn’t tell who they were. Perhaps not anyone she knew, for this was vacation, and there were likely to be strangers in town.

Then the train passed on and they were lost to view.