ff-Jack's help, nor he without
mine! Why, just see what a failure the effort to build this road was,
until"--the locomotive bellowed.

"Half-an-hour late, and slowing up again!" exclaimed John. He knew the
parson's wife was pressing his mother to spend the night with them, and
he was afraid of having his soul asked after. "Why do we stop here,
hardly a mile from town?"

"It's to let my folks off. They're going to walk over to the pike while
I go on for the carriage and drive out; they and Jeff-Jack and the
Hallidays."

The train stopped where a beautiful lane crossed the track between two
fenced fields. Fair and Barbara alighted and stood on a flowery bank
with the sun glowing in some distant tree-tops behind them. Fannie
leaned from the train, took both Jeff-Jack's uplifted hands and
fluttered down upon rebounding tiptoes; the bell sounded, the scene
changed, and John murmured to himself in heavy agony,

"He's going to ask her! O, Fannie, Fannie, if you'd only refuse to say
yes, and give me three years to show what I can do! But he's going to
ask her before that sun goes down, and what's she going to say?"

XXVIII.

INFORMATION FOR SALE

"Hope of Suez!" Garnet felt he had spoken just these three words too
many. "Overtalked myself again," he said to himself while chatting with
others; "a liar always does. But he shall pay for this. Ah me!"

He was right. The young man would have sucked down all his flattery but
for those three words. Yet on one side they were true, and March guiltily
felt them so as, looking at his mother, he thought again of that deep
store of the earth's largess lying under their unfruitful custody. Suez
and her three counties would have jeered the gaudy name from Lover's
Leap to Libertyville though had they guessed better the meaning of the
change into which a world's progress was irresistibly pushing them,
whoever owned Widewood must have stood for some of their largest wishes
and hopes, and they would have ceased to deride the blessed mutation and
to hobble it with that root of so many world-wide evils--the calling
still private what the common need has made public. The ghost of this
thought flitted in John's mind, but would not be grasped or beckoned to
the light.

"I wish I could think," he sighed, but he could only think of Fannie.
The train stopped. The excursionists swarmed forth. The cannon belched
out its thunderous good-byes, and John went for his horse and buggy,
promis