With all our precautions, we were rather late, for the last bell was ringing; Ann was in a fever of impatience, and I was quite uncertain what to do, the clerk not having returned, and Mr. Kilian Vandermarck not having yet appeared.  Ann was so disagreeable, and so disturbing to all thinking, that I had more than once to tell her to be quiet.  Matters seemed to have reached a crisis.  The man at the gangway was shouting “all aboard;” the whistle was blowing; the bell was ringing; Ann was whimpering; when a belated-looking young man with a book and paper under his arm came up the stairs hurriedly and looked around with anxiety.  As soon as his eye fell on us, he looked relieved, and walked directly up to me, and called me by name, interrogatively.

“O yes,” I said eagerly, “but do get this woman off the boat or we’ll have to take her with us.”  “Oh, no danger,” he said, “plenty of time,” and he took her toward the stairs, at the head of which she was met by the clerk, who touched his hat to me, handed the checks to Mr. Vandermarck, then hurried off with Ann.  Mr. Vandermarck returned to me, but I was so engrossed looking over the side of the boat and watching for Ann and the clerk, that I took no notice of him.

At last I saw Ann scramble on the wharf, just before the plank was drawn in; with a sigh of relief I turned away.

“I want to apologize for being so late,” he said.

“Why, it is not any matter,” I answered, “only I had not the least idea what to do.”

“You are not used to travelling alone, then, I suppose?”

“Oh no,” nor to travelling any way, for the matter of that, I added to myself; but not aloud, for I had a great fear that it should be known how very limited my experience was.

“You must let me take your shawl and bag, and we will go and get a comfortable seat,” he said in a few moments.  We went forward and found comfortable chairs under an awning, and where there was a fine breeze.  It was a warm afternoon, and the change from the heated and glaring wharf was delightful.  Mr. Vandermarck threw himself back in his chair with an expression of relief, and took off his straw hat.

“If you had been in Wall-street since ten o’clock this morning you would be prepared to enjoy this sail,” he said.

“Is Wall-street so very much more disagreeable than other places?  I think my uncle regrets every moment that he spends away from it.”

“Ah, yes.  Mr. Greer may; he has a good deal to make him like it; if I made as much money as he does every day there, I think it’s possible I might like it too.  But it is a different matter with a poor devil like me:  if I get off without being cheated out of all I’ve got, it is as much as I can ask.”

“Well, perhaps when he was your age, Uncle Leonard did not ask more than that.”

“Not he; he began, long before he was as old as I am, to do what I can never learn to do, Miss d’Esiree—­make money with one hand and save it with the other.  Now, I’m ashamed to say, a great deal of money comes into my pockets, but it never stays there long enough to give me the feeling that I’m a rich man.  One gets into a way of living that’s destruction to all chances of a fortune.”