ds of Burnmore Park, of the
changing skies and stirring soft winds of our grey green Motherland.
There was fog in the Irish Sea, and we lost the better part of a day
hooting our way towards Liverpool while I fretted about the ship with
all my luggage packed, staring at the grey waters that weltered under
the mist. It was the longest day in my life. My heart was full of
desire, my eyes ached for the little fields and golden October skies of
England, England that was waiting to welcome me back from my exile with
such open arms. I was coming home,--home.

I hurried through London into Surrey and in my father's study, warned by
a telegram, I found a bright-eyed, resolute young woman awaiting me,
with the quality about her of one who embarks upon a long premeditated
adventure. And I found too a family her sisters and her brother all
gladly ready for me, my father too was a happy man, and on the eighth of
November in 1906 Rachel and I were married in the little church at
Shere. We stayed for a week or so in Hampshire near Ringwood, the season
was late that year and the trees still very beautiful; and then we went
to Portofino on the Ligurian coast.

There presently Gidding joined us and we began to work out the schemes
we had made in America, the schemes that now fill my life.

CHAPTER THE TENTH

MARY WRITES

Sec. 1

It was in the early spring of 1909 that I had a letter from Mary.

By that time my life was set fully upon its present courses, Gidding and
I had passed from the stage of talking and scheming to definite
undertakings. Indeed by 1909 things were already organized upon their
present lines. We had developed a huge publishing establishment with one
big printing plant in Barcelona and another in Manchester, and we were
studying the peculiar difficulties that might attend the establishment
of a third plant in America. Our company was an English company under
the name of Alphabet and Mollentrave, and we were rapidly making it the
broadest and steadiest flow of publication the world had ever seen. Its
streams already reached further and carried more than any single firm
had ever managed to do before. We were reprinting, in as carefully
edited and revised editions as we could, the whole of the English,
Spanish and French literature, and we were only waiting for the release
of machinery to attack German, Russian and Italian, and were giving each
language not only its own but a very complete series of good