But neither of them knew.

They were from the adjoining town, which this railroad served as well as Green River.
Sometimes Mrs.Field looked at them, but with no speculation; the next moment she looked in the same way upon the belongings of the little country depot--the battered yellow settees, the time-tables, the long stove in its tract of littered sawdust, the man's face in the window of the ticket-office.
"Dreadful cross-lookin', ain't she ?" one of the women whispered in the other's ear.
Jane heard the whisper, and looked at them.

The women gave each other violent pokes, they reddened and tittered nervously, then they tried to look out of the window with an innocent and absent air.

But they need not have been troubled.

Jane, although she heard the whisper perfectly, did not connect it with herself at all.