Joey was on a bench most of the way down the platform, away from the pool of light under the overhang, sitting alone with his valise between her feet. He could hear the train off away down the river, the sound coming through the night like the mighty roar of a band of angels. He set her bags down and sat beside her and said, “I gave one of your ten-dollar gold pieces to that stump-legged man inside.”

She was silent, looking ahead of her, the paper folder with the train tickets held in both hands on her lap.

“I’ll pay you back. There must’ve been some left after buying the tickets.”

She looked at him. Her face cut up and bruised with shadow so all there was to see of her was her loveliness. A face he might have dreamed if he’d known enough to. She said, “You think the train’ll beat the guineas here?”

“I hope. I hear it coming.”

“You wouldn’t hear them.”

“I know it.”

“That gold piece wasn’t yours to give.”

“I’ll pay it back. He’s blind. Wouldn’t know one banknote from another. I wanted him to know what he had.”

“I don’t want it paid back.”

“You didn’t even mention that bag, telling me what to get.”

“I knew you’d find it.”

“I can go get it back from him.”

“No,” she said. “Let him have it.”

They rode the Boston train to Montpelier and waited an hour and caught a local east to St. Johnsbury, where they would wait again for the Maine Central eastbound toward Portland. He had been stiff and silent during the first layover as they sat off again down in the shadows, able to see the statehouse dome lighted against the night sky somewhere behind them, and she sat without speaking as she had on the train, her head tipped a little to one side as if to conceal her marking but also as if to leave him be. He thinking all through that first layover that a fast man angry enough could make the distance from Barre during that hour. Once back on a train this lifted and she responded by relaxing enough to lean against him and sleep. So they came into St. Johnsbury in the long pale thin summer dawn, the town this early only ghosts of structures within the river mist and empty but for a stray handful of dogs teamed up to patrol the streets, and once a glimpsed milkwagon, the canary yellow paint blunted by the dawn but still brilliant, as if a voice speaking, calling some name down the empty streets. Here they got out and went away from the station to a nearby place where they ate red-flannel hash topped with fried eggs and toasted loaf-bread and then he reached across the table and she sat looking a long moment before she reached out and ran her curled fingers down the back of his hand. Except for small words of excuse or reassurance neither had spoken to the other since the evening before. But still they went away from their breakfast back toward the train hand in hand, as if for the moment God had paused and turned away, lingering elsewhere, content to let these two be the life of the world, their sweet unspoken understanding all the judgment ever needed.