Then it
contracted swiftly, sucking in its sound until it left only a
reverberant echo, which died upon the farther bank.
Silence crept down again over the wet country; the faint dripping
resumed, and suddenly a great shower of drops tumbled upon Gloria
stirring her out of the trance-like torpor which the passage of the
train had wrought. She ran swiftly down a descending level to the bank
and began climbing the iron stairway to the bridge, remembering that it
was something she had always wanted to do, and that she would have the
added excitement of traversing the yard-wide plank that ran beside the
tracks over the river.
There! This was better. She was at the top now and could see the lands
about her as successive sweeps of open country, cold under the moon,
coarsely patched and seamed with thin rows and heavy clumps of trees. To
her right, half a mile down the river, which trailed away behind the
light like the shiny, slimy path of a snail, winked the scattered lights
of Marietta. Not two hundred yards away at the end of the bridge
squatted the station, marked by a sullen lantern. The oppression was
lifted now--the tree-tops below her were rocking the young starlight to
a haunted doze.
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