LAUREL AND HER mother spent all the next day, from ten in the morning until eight at night in the waiting-room at the Junction. The waiting-room at the Junction was hot and dusty. It swarmed with flies, attracted by discarded lunch-boxes and paper bags. It smelled of cinders and hot steel. There were settees built around the edge of the waiting-room. They were painted mop-colored gray, divided by iron arms into spaces, so that no one could lie down upon them. Laurel arranged the suitcases as best she could, for her mother’s feet, and rolled up a traveling-coat into a pillow for her head. All day Laurel hovered solicitously about her mother, offering her frequent drinks of water, which she brought in a paper cup; trying to tempt her with crackers and cheese and sweet chocolate, which she procured from a general store, half a mile up the road; asking her from time to time how she felt; showing concern, anxiety, but not the slightest sign of yielding or regret. Stella, resigned now, and stoically submissive, sat silent and unresponsive all day long. At measured intervals she sighed deeply, eloquently.

At eight o’clock in the evening a Pullman car was backed up to the Junction and side-tracked there for an hour or so to await several incoming trains from various points of the compass. Laurel and her mother crawled in between the sheets of a lower berth in the Pullman car a little after nine.

Laurel was on the inside of the berth. Stella’s obdurate back was turned toward her. As Laurel stretched her long slim body down beside her mother, she slipped her hand under her mother’s arm—around her waist, as she always did when she went to sleep—though she hadn’t last night.

“Mother,” she whispered, “aren’t you going to forgive me pretty soon?”

Stella pressed the precious hand, drew it closely around her.

“Of course I am, you crazy kid,” she whispered back. “I don’t care what you do, just so I’ve got you to do it. Gosh, I can’t stay mad with you any longer!”

Laurel’s arm tightened. That was all right then. Oh, if only Richard—if only he—her arm loosened, grew limp. Laurel fell to sleep almost immediately. So did Stella. They both had been asleep for an hour or so when the hotel train whistled into the Junction at about half-past ten.

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