her weak worn eyes of brown were wet with tears—“as the sayin’goes—to a strange land—a stranger among strange people.—It may be a long, long time,” she whispered in an old husky tone, her eyes tear-wet as she shook her head mysteriously with a brave pathetic smile that suddenly filled the boy with rending pity, anguish of the soul, and a choking sense of exasperation and of woman’s unfairness—“I hope we are all here when you come back again…. I hope you find us all alive….” She smiled bravely, mysteriously, tearfully. “You never know,” she whispered, “you never know.”
“Mama,” he could hear his voice sound hoarsely and remotely in his throat, choked with anguish and exasperation at her easy fluency of sorrow, “—Mama—in Christ’s name! Why do you have to act like this every time someone goes away!… I beg of you, for God’s sake, not to do it!”
“Oh, stop it! Stop it!” his sister said in a rough, peremptory and yet kindly tone to the mother, her eyes grave and troubled, but with a faint rough smile about the edges of her generous mouth. “He’s not going away for ever! Why, good heavens, you act as if someone is dead! Boston’s not so far away you’ll never see him again! The trains are running every day, you know…. Besides,” she said abruptly and with an assurance that infuriated the boy, “he’s not going today, anyway. Why, you haven’t any intention of going today, you know you haven’t,” she said to him. “He’s been fooling you all along,” she now said, turning to the mother with an air of maddening assurance. “He has no idea of taking that train. He’s going to wait over until tomorrow. I’ve known it all along.”
The boy went stamping away from them up the platform, and then came stamping back at them while the other people on the platform grinned and stared.
“Helen, in God’s name!” he croaked frantically. “Why do you start that when I’m all packed up and waiting here at the God-damned station for the train? You know I’m going away today!” he yelled, with a sudden sick desperate terror in his heart as he thought that something might now come in the way of going. “You know I am! Why did we come here? What in Christ’s name are we waiting for if you don’t think I’m going?”
The young woman laughed her high, husky laugh which was almost deliberately irritating and derisive—“Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi!”—and plodded him in the ribs with her large stiff fingers. Then, almost wearily, she
