hour before noon
For the moment , the torturing stress was lifted from his soul ; he wished that the breakfast in the miller 's house might never come to an end ; he explored the mill with Flavia ; he bantered the Squire on his saturnine preference for steam power in the milling business ; he made the others share his mood ; he pushed far from him the series of tragic or squalid facts which had continually brought the end to him in reveries in which he found himself holding his breath , as if he might hold it till the end really came . But this respite could not last . A puff of white steam showed on the horizon , and after an interval the sound of the locomotive whistle reached them , as it came backing down a train of empty cars towards them . They were quickly on their journey again , and a scanty hour before noon they arrived at Tecumseh . The pretty town , which in prospect had worn to Olive Halleck 's imagination the blended hideousness of Sodom and Gomorrah , was certainly very much more like a New England village in fact . After the brick farmsteads and coal-smoked towns of Central Ohio , its wooden houses , set back from the street with an ample depth of door-yard , were appealingly familiar , and she exchanged some homesick whispers with Marcia about them , as they drove along under the full-leaved maples which shadowed the way . The grass was denser and darker than in New England , and , pretty as the town was , it wore a more careless and unscrupulous air than the true New England village ; the South had touched it , and here and there it showed a wavering line of fence and a faltering conscientiousness in its paint .