Then her suddenly awakened fear began to suggest answers. Maybe something might keep her father from coming to meet them. She and Will'm wouldn't know what to do or where to go. They'd be lost in a great city like the little Match Girl was on Christmas eve, and they'd freeze to death on some stranger's doorstep. There was a picture of the Match Girl thus frozen, in the Hans Andersen book which Susie Peters kept in her desk at school. There was a cruel stepmother picture in the same book, Libby remembered, and recollections of that turned her thoughts into still deeper channels of foreboding. What would _she_ be like? What was going to happen to her and Will'm at the end of this journey if it ever came to an end? If only they could be back at the Junction, safe and sound--
The tears began to drip slowly. She wiped them away with the back of the hand that was farthest away from Will'm. She was miserable enough to die, but she didn't want him to wake up and find it out. A lady who had been watching her for some time, came and sat down in the opposite seat and asked her what was the matter, and if she was crying because she was homesick, and what was her name and how far they were going. But Libby never answered a single question. The tears just kept dripping and her mouth working in a piteous attempt to swallow her sobs, and finally the lady saw that she was frightening her, and only making matters worse by trying to comfort her, so she went back to her seat.
When Will'm wakened after a while and sat up, leaving Libby's arm all stiff and prickly from being bent in one position so long, the train had been running for miles through a lonely country where nobody seemed to live. Just as he rubbed his eyes wide awake they came to a forest of Christmas trees. At least, they looked as if all they needed to make them that, was for some one to fasten candles on their snow-laden boughs. Then the whistle blew the signal that meant that the train was about to stop, and Will'm scrambled up on his knees again, and they both looked out expectantly.
There was no station at this place of stopping. Only by special order from some high official did this train come to a halt here, so somebody of importance must be coming aboard. All they saw at first was a snowy road opening through the grove of Christmas trees, but standing in this road, a few rods from the train, was a sleigh drawn by two big black horses. They had bells on their bridles which went ting-a-ling whenever they shook their heads or pawed the snow. The children could not see a trunk being put into the baggage car farther up the track, but they saw what happened in the delay.