Poor little Bel Bree, just dropped down out of New Hampshire!  What a problem the great city was already to her!

Miss Tonker put her sub-aristocratic face in at the door.  It is a curious kind of reflected majesty that these important functionaries get, who take at first hand the magnificent orders, and sustain temporary relations of silk-and-velvet intimacy with Spreadsplendid Park.

The hour was up.  Mary Pinfall slid her romance into the pocket of her waterproof; Matilda Meane swallowed her last mouthful of the four cream-cakes which she had valorously demolished without assistance, and hastily washed her hands at the faucet; Kate and Elise and Grace brushed by her with a sniff of generous contempt.

In two minutes, the wheels and feeds were buzzing and clicking again.  What did they say, and emphasize, and repeat, in the ears that bent over them?  Mechanical time-beats say something, always.  They force in and in upon the soul its own pulses of thought, or memory, or purpose; of imagination or desire.  They weld and consolidate our moods, our elements.  Twenty miles of musing to the rhythmic throbbings of a railroad train, who does not know how it can shape and deepen and confirm whatever one has started with in mind or heart?

CHAPTER XI.

CRISTOFERO.

A September morning on the deck of a steamer bound into New York, two days from her port.

A fair wind; waves gleaming as they tossed landward, with the white crests and the grand swell that told of some mid-Atlantic storm, which had given them their impulse days since, and would send them breaking upon the American capes and beaches, in splendid tumult of foam, and roar, and plunge; “white horses,” wearing rainbows in their manes.

The blue heaven full of sunshine; the air full of sea-tingle; a morning to feel the throb and spring of the vessel under one’s feet, as an answer to the throb and spring of one’s own life and eagerness; the leap of strength in the veins, and the homeward haste in the heart.

Two gentlemen, who had talked much together in the nine days of their ship-companionship, stood together at the taffrail.

One was the Reverend Hilary Vireo, minister of Mavis Place Chapel, Boston,—­coming back to his work in glorious renewal from his eight weeks’ holiday in Europe.  The other was Christopher Kirkbright, younger partner of the house of Ferguson, Ramsay, and Kirkbright, tea and silk merchants, Hong Kong.  Christopher Kirkbright had gone out to China from Glasgow, at the age of twenty-one, pledged to a ten years’ stay.  For five years past, he had had a share in the business for himself; for the two last, he had represented also the interest of Grahame Kirkbright, his uncle, third partner; had inherited, besides, half of his estate; the other half had come to our friend at home, his sister, Miss Euphrasia.

“I had no right to stay out there any longer, making my tools; multiplying them, without definite purpose.  It was time to put them to their use; and I have come home to find it.  A man may take till thirty-one to get ready, mayn’t he, Mr. Vireo?”