have missed you so much."

"And, Oh, how happy I am to hear that you have missed me! I have been
away to the North--on the road to Iceland. May I call on you this
evening, and tell you about my journey?"

"Yes, indeed! If you will pleasure me so far, I will send an excuse to
Lady Thirsk, and stay at home to listen to you."

"That would be a miraculous favor. May I come early?"

"We dine early. Come and take your dinner with us. Mother will be glad
to see you and to hear your adventures, and mother's pleasure is my
greatest happiness."

"Then I will come."

As he spoke, he took out his watch and looked at it. "I have an
engagement in ten minutes," he said. "Will you excuse me now?"

"I will. I wish I had an engagement. Poor women! They have bare lives. I
would like to go to business. I would like to make money. There are days
in which I feel that I could run a thousand spindles or manage a
department store very well and very happily."

"Why do you talk of things impossible? Good-bye!"

"Until seven o'clock?"

"Until seven."

He had dismounted to speak to her and, holding Bendigo's bridle, had
walked with her to the Harlow residence. He now said, "Good-bye," and
the light of a true, passionate lover was on his face, as he leaped into
the saddle. She watched him out of sight and then went into her home,
and with an inscrutable smile, began to arrange the ferns and bluebells
in a vase of cream-colored wedgewood.

In the meantime John had reached the Hatton mill, and after his long
absence he looked up at it with conscious pride. It was built of brick;
it was ten stories high; every story was full of windows, every story
airy as a bird-cage. Certainly it was not a thing of architectural
beauty, but it was a grandly organized machine where brains and hands,
iron and steel worked together for a common end. As John entered its big
iron gates, he saw bales of cotton going into the mill by one door, and
he knew the other door at which they would come out in the form of woven
calico. In rapid thought he followed them to the upper floors, and then
traveled down with them to the great weaving-rooms in the order their
processes advanced them. He knew that on the highest floor a devil would
tear the fiber asunder, that it would then go to the scutcher, and have
the dust and dirt blown away, then that carding machines would lay all
the fibers parallel, that drawing machines would group them into slender
ribbons, and a ro