Studiously she reduced her travelling gear to the simplest requisites; the hand-bag she took because she had a use for it, nothing less than to serve as a cover for the return of everything she wore.
She was determined to go out of this Island world, whose ether was too rare for her vulgar lungs, with no more than she had brought into it.
At length the laggard hands of the clock were close together on the figure 6.
She rose, let herself out of the room, and by way of that memorable side door issued forth into a morning as rarely beautiful as ever that blessed Island knew. It made renunciation doubly difficult. Yet Sally did not falter or once look back.
Her way to the village wharf was shortest by the beach. None saw her steal through the formal garden (with eyes averted from that one marble seat which was forever distinguished from all others in the world) and vanish over the lip of the cliff by way of its long, zigzag stairway. Few noticed her as she debouched from the beach into the village streets; her dress was inconspicuous, her demeanour even more than retiring.
Her hope was favoured in that on this earlier trip of the boat there were few passengers other than natives of the Island.
On the mainland she caught an accommodation train which wound a halting way through the morning and set her down in Providence late in the forenoon. Then ignorance of railroad travel made her choose another accommodation instead of an express which would have cost no more and landed her in New York an hour earlier.
Her flight was financed by a few dollars left over from her bridge winnings of the first day at Gosnold House after subsequent losses had been paid. Their sum no more than sufficed; when she had purchased a meagre lunch at the station counter in New Haven she was penniless again; but for the clothes she wore she landed in New York even as she had left it.
The city received her with a deafening roar that seemed of exultation that its prey had been delivered unto it again.
The heat was even more oppressive than that of the day on which she had left--or perhaps seemed so by contrast with the radiant coolness of the Island air.
Avoiding Park Avenue, she sought the place that she called home by way of Lexington.