At Yonkers a down train ranged by the side of Wade’s train, and, looking out, he saw Mr. and Mrs. Skerrett alighting.

He jumped down, rather surprised, to speak to them.

“We have just been telegraphed here,” said Peter, gravely.  “The son of a widow, a friend of ours, was drowned this morning in the soft ice of the river.  He was a pet of mine, poor fellow! and the mother depends upon me for advice.  We have come down to say a kind word.  Why won’t you report us to the ladies at my house, and say we shall not be at home until the evening train?  They do not know the cause of our journey, except that it is a sad one.”

“Perhaps Mr. Wade will carve their turkey for them at dinner, Peter,” Fanny suggested.

“Do, Wade! and keep their spirits up.  Dinner’s at six.”

Here the engine whistled.  Wade promised to “shine substitute” at his friend’s board, and took his place again.  The train galloped away.

Peter and his wife exchanged a bright look over the fortunate incident of this meeting, and went on their kind way to carry sympathy and such consolation as might be to the widow.

The train galloped northward.  Until now, the beat of its wheels, like the click of an enormous metronome, had kept time to jubilant measures singing in Wade’s brain.  He was hurrying back, exhilarated with success, to the presence of a woman whose smile was finer exhilaration than any number of votes of confidence, passed unanimously by any number of conclaves of overjoyed Directors, and signed by Brummage after Brummage, with the signature of a capitalist in a flurry of delight at a ten per cent dividend.

But into this joyous mood of Wade’s the thought of death suddenly intruded.  He could not keep a picture of death and drowning out of his mind.  As the train sprang along and opened gloomy breadth after breadth of the leaden river, clogged with slow-drifting files of ice-blocks, he found himself staring across the dreary waste and forever fancying some one sinking there, helpless and alone.

He seemed to see a brave, bright-eyed, ruddy boy, venturing out carelessly along the edges of the weakened ice.  Suddenly the ice gives way, the little figure sinks, rises, clutches desperately at a fragment, struggles a moment, is borne along in the relentless flow of the chilly water, stares in vain shoreward, and so sinks again with a look of agony, and is gone.

But whenever this inevitable picture grew before Wade’s eyes, as the drowning figure of his fancy vanished, it suddenly changed features, and presented the face of Mary Damer, perishing beyond succor.

Of course he knew that this was but a morbid vision.  Yet that it came at all, and that it so agonized him, proved the force of his new feeling.

He had not analyzed it before.  This thought of death became its touchstone.

Men like Wade, strong, healthy, earnest, concentrated, straightforward, isolated, judge men and women as friends or foes at once and once for all.  He had recognized in Mary Damer from the first a heart as true, whole, noble, and healthy as his own.  A fine instinct had told him that she was waiting for her hero, as he was for his heroine.