WHEN Betty found herself seated on the day coach of a way train, jogging along toward a town she had never seen and away from the scenes and people of her childhood, she found herself trembling violently.  It was as if she had suddenly been placed in an airplane all by herself and started off to the moon without any knowledge of her motor power or destination.  It both frightened and exhilarated her.  She wanted to cry and she wanted to laugh, but she did neither.  Instead she sat demurely for the first hour and a half looking out of the window like any traveler, scarcely turning her head nor looking at anything in the car.  It seemed to her that there might be a detective in every seat just waiting for her to lift her eyes that he might recognize her.  But gradually as the time dragged by and the landscape grew monotonous she began to feel a little more at her ease.  Furtively she studied her neighbors.  She had seldom traveled in a common car, and it was new to her to study all types as she could see them here.  She smiled at a dirty baby and wished she had something to give it.  She studied the careworn man and the woman in black who wept behind her veil and would not smile no matter how hard the man tried to make her.  It was a revelation to her that any man would try as hard as that to make a woman smile.  She watched the Italian family with five children and nine bundles, and counted the colors on a smart young woman who got in at a way station.  Every minute of the day was interesting.  Every mile of dreary November landscape that whirled by gave her more freedom.

She opened the little shabby handbag that Jane had given her and got out the bit of mirror one inch by an inch and a half backed with pasteboard on which lingered particles of the original green taffeta lining and studied her own strange face, trying to get used to her new self and her new name.  Jane had written it, Lizzie Hope, on the back of the envelope containing the address of Mrs. Carson.  It seemed somehow an identification card.  She studied it curiously and wondered if Lizzie Hope was going to be any happier than Betty Stanhope had been.  And then she fell to thinking over the strange experiences of the last twenty-four hours and wondering whether she had done right or not, and whether her father would have been disappointed in her, “ashamed of her,” as her stepmother had said.  Somehow Jane had made her feel that he would not, and she was more light-hearted than she had been for many a day.

Late in the afternoon she began to wonder what Tinsdale would be like.  In the shabby handbag was her ticket to Tinsdale and eight dollars and a half in change.  It made her feel richer than she had ever felt in her life, although she had never been stinted as to pocket money.  But this was her very own, for her needs, and nobody but herself to say how she should spend either it or her time.

Little towns came in sight and passed, each one with one or two churches, a schoolhouse, a lot of tiny houses.  Would Tinsdale look this way?  How safe these places seemed, yet lonely, too!  Still, no one would ever think of looking for her in a lonely little village.

They passed a big brick institution, and she made out the words, “State Asylum,” and shuddered inwardly as she thought of what Jane had told her about the morning paper.  Suppose they should hunt her up and put her in an insane asylum, just to show the world that it had not been their fault that she had run away from her wedding!  The thought was appalling.  She dropped her head on her hand with her face toward the window and tried to pretend she was asleep and hide the tears that would come, but presently a boy came in at the station with a big basket and she bought a ham sandwich and an apple.  It tasted good.  She had not expected that it would.  She decided that she must have been pretty hungry and then fell to counting her money, aghast that the meager supper had made such a hole in her capital.  She must be very careful.  This might be all the money she would have for a very long time, and there was no telling what kind of an impossible place she was going to.  She might have to get away as eagerly as she had come.  Jane was all right, but that was not saying that her mother and sisters would be.

It was growing dark, and the lights were lit in the car.  All the little Italian babies had been given drinks of water, and strange things to eat, and tumbled to sleep across laps and on seats, anywhere they would stick.  They looked so funny and dirty and pitiful with their faces all streaked with soot and molasses candy that somebody had given them.  The mother looked tired and greasy and the father was fat and dark, with unpleasant black eyes that seemed to roll a great deal.  Yet he was kind to the babies and his wife seemed to like him.  She wondered what kind of a home they had, and what relation the young fellow with the shiny dark curls bore to them.  He seemed to take as much care of the babies as did their father and mother.

The lights were flickering out in the villages now and gave a friendly inhabited look to the houses.  Sometimes when the train paused at stations Betty could see people moving back and forth at what seemed to be kitchen tables and little children bringing dishes out, all working together.  It looked pleasant and she wondered if it would be like that where she was going.  A big lump of loneliness was growing in her throat.  It was one thing to run away from something that you hated, but it was another to jump into a new life where one neither knew nor was known.  Betty began to shrink inexpressibly from it all.  Not that she wanted to go back!  Oh, no; far from it!  But once when they passed a little white cemetery with tall dark fir trees waving guardingly above the white stones she looked out almost wistfully.  If she were lying in one of those beside her father and mother how safe and rested she would be.  She wouldn’t have to worry any more.  What was it like where father and mother had gone?  Was it a real place?  Or was that just the end when one died?  Well, if she were sure it was all she would not care.  She would be willing to just go out and not be.  But somehow that didn’t seem to be the commonly accepted belief.  There was always a beyond in most people’s minds, and a fear of just what Betty didn’t know.  She was a good deal of a heathen, though she did not know that either.

Then, just as she was floundering into a lot of theological mysteries of her own discovery the nasal voice of the conductor called out:  “Tinsdale!  Tinsdale!” and she hurried to her feet in something of a panic, conscious of her short hair and queer clothes.

Down on the platform she stood a minute trying to get used to her feet, they felt so numb and empty from long sitting.  Her head swam just a little, too, and the lights on the station and in the houses near by seemed to dance around her weirdly.  She had a feeling that she would rather wait until the train was gone before she began to search for her new home, and then when the wheels ground and began to turn and the conductor shouted “All aboard!” and swung himself up the step as she had seen him do a hundred times that afternoon, a queer sinking feeling of loneliness possessed her, and she almost wanted to catch the rail and swing back on again as the next pair of car steps flung by her.

Then a voice that sounded a little like Jane’s said pleasantly in her ear:  “Is this Lizzie Hope?” and Betty turned with a thrill of actual fright to face Nellie Carson and her little sister Emily.

“Bobbie’ll be here in a minute to carry your suitcase,” said Nellie efficiently; “he just went over to see if he could borrow Jake Peter’s wheelbarrow in case you had a trunk.  You didn’t bring your trunk?  O, but you’re going to stay, aren’t you?  I’m goin’ up to the city to take a p’sition, and Mother’d be awful lonesome.  Sometime of course we’ll send fer them to come, but now the children’s little an’ the country’s better fer them.  They gotta go to school awhile.  You’ll stay, won’t you?”

“How do you know you’ll want me?” laughed Betty, at her ease in this unexpected air of welcome.

“Why, of course we’d want you.  Jane sent you.  Jane wouldn’t of sent you if you hadn’t been a good scout.  Jane knows.  Besides, I’ve got two eyes, haven’t I?  I guess I can tell right off.”

Emily’s shy little hand stole into Betty’s and the little girl looked up: 

“I’m awful glad you come!  I think you’re awful pretty!”

“Thank you!” said Betty, warmly squeezing the little confiding hand.  It was the first time in her life that a little child had come close to her in this confiding way.  Her life had not been among children.

Then Bob whirled up, bareheaded, freckled, whistling, efficient, and about twelve years old.  He grabbed the suitcase, eyed the stranger with a pleasant grin, and stamped off into the darkness ahead of them.

It was a new experience to Betty to be walking down a village street with little houses on each side and lights and warmth and heads bobbing through the windows.  It stirred some memory of long ago, before she could scarcely remember.  She wondered, had her own mother ever lived in a small village?

“That’s our church,” confided Emily, as they passed a large frame building with pointed steeple and belfry.  “They’re goin’ to have a entertainment t’morra night, an’ we’re all goin’ and Ma said you cud go too.”

“Isn’t that lovely!” said Betty, feeling a sudden lump like tears in her throat.  It was just like living out a fairy story.  She hadn’t expected to be taken right in to family life this way.

“But how did you know I was coming on that train?” she asked the older girl suddenly.  “Jane said she was going to telegraph, but I expected to have to hunt around to find the house.”

“Oh, we just came down to every train after the telegram came.  This is the last train to-night, and we were awful scared for fear you wouldn’t come till morning, an’ have to stay on the train all night.  Ma says it isn’t nice for a girl to have to travel alone at night.  Ma always makes Jane and me go daytimes.”

“It was just lovely of you,” said Betty, wondering if she was talking “natural” enough to please Jane.

“Did you bob you hair ’cause you had a fever?” asked Nellie enviously.

“No,” said Betty, “that is, I haven’t been very well, and I thought it might be good for me,” she finished, wondering how many questions like that it was going to be hard for her to answer without telling a lie.  A lie was something that her father had made her feel would hurt him more deeply than anything else she could do.

“I just love it,” said Nellie enthusiastically.  “I wanted to cut mine, an’ so did Jane, but Ma wouldn’t let us.  She says God gave us our hair, an’ we oughtta take care of it.”

“That’s true, too,” said Betty.  “I never thought about that.  But I guess mine will grow again after a while.  I think it will be less trouble this way.  But it’s very dirty with traveling.  I think I’ll have to wash it before I put it on a pillow.”

That had troubled Betty greatly.  She didn’t know how to get rid of that hair dye before Jane’s family got used to having it dark.

“Sure, you can wash it, if you ain’t ‘fraid of takin’ cold.  There’s lots of hot water.  Ma thought you’d maybe want to take a bath.  We’ve got a big tin bath-tub out in the back shed.  Ma bought it off the Joneses when they got their porcelain one put into their house.  We don’t have no runnin’ water but we have an awful good well.  Here’s our house.  I guess Bob’s got there first.  See, Ma’s out on the steps waitin’ fer us.”

The house was a square wooden affair, long wanting paint, and trimmed with little scrollwork around the diminutive front porch.  The color was indescribable, blending well into the surroundings either day or night.  It had a cheerful, decent look, but very tiny.  There was a small yard about it with a picket fence, and a leafless lilac bush.  A cheerful barberry bush flanked the gate on either side.  The front door was open into a tiny hall and beyond the light streamed forth from a glass lamp set on a pleasant dining-room table covered with a red cloth.  Betty stepped inside the gate and found herself enveloped in two motherly arms, and then led into the light and warmth of the family dining-room.