But when Miss Damer returned in the afternoon, her mother was taking a gentle nap over the violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red stripes of a gorgeous Afghan she was knitting.  The daughter heard nothing of the billet.  The house was lonely without Fanny Skerrett.  Mr. Wade did not come at the appointed hour.  Mary was not—­willing to say to herself how much she regretted his absence.

Had he forgotten the appointment?

No,—­that was a thought not to be tolerated.

“A gentleman does not forget,” she thought.  And she had a thorough confidence, besides, that this gentleman was very willing to remember.

She read a little, fitfully, sang fitfully, moved about the house uneasily; and at last, when it grew late, and she was bored and Wade did not arrive, she pronounced to herself that he had been detained in town.

This point settled, she took her skates, put on her pretty Amazonian hat with its alert feather, and went down to waste her beauty and grace on the ice, unattended and alone.

CHAPTER XI.

CAP’S AMBUSTER’S SKIFF.

It was a busy afternoon at the Dunderbunk Foundry.

The Superintendent had come back with his pocket full of orders.  Everybody, from the Czar of Russia to the President of the Guano Republic, was in the market for machinery.  Crisis was gone by.  Prosperity was come.  The world was all ready to move, and only waited for a fresh supply of wheels, cranks, side-levers, walking-beams, and other such muscular creatures of iron, to push and tug and swing and revolve and set Progress a-going.

Dunderbunk was to have its full share in supplying the demand.  It was well understood by this time that the iron Wade made was as stanch as the man who made it.  Dunderbunk, therefore, Head and Hands, must despatch.

So it was a busy afternoon at the industrious Foundry.  The men bestirred themselves.  The furnaces rumbled.  The engine thumped.  The drums in the finishing-shop hummed merrily their lively song of labor.  The four trip-hammers—­two bull-headed, two calf-headed—­champed, like carnivorous maws, upon red bars of iron, and over their banquet they roared the big-toned music of the trip-hammer chorus,—­

                “Now, then! hit hard! 
  Strike while Iron’s hot.  Life’s short.  Art’s long.”

By this massive refrain, ringing in at intervals above the ceaseless buzz, murmur, and clang throughout the buildings, every man’s work was mightily nerved and inspired.  Everybody liked to hear the sturdy song of these grim vocalists; and whenever they struck in, each solo or duo or quatuor of men, playing Anvil Chorus, quickened time, and all the action and rumor of the busy opera went on more cheerily and lustily.  So work kept astir like play.

An hour before sunset, Bill Tarbox stepped into Wade’s office.  Even oily and begrimed, Bill could be recognized as a favored lover.  He looked more a man than ever before.