Theron felt, rather than phrased to himself, that there would not be “ten or a dozen in the party” on that yacht.  Without defining anything in his mind, he breathed in fancy the same bold ocean breeze which filled the sails, and toyed with Celia’s hair; he looked with her as she sat by the rail, and saw the same waves racing past, the same vast dome of cloud and ether that were mirrored in her brown eyes, and there was no one else anywhere near them.  Even the men in sailors’ clothes, who would be pulling at ropes, or climbing up tarred ladders, kept themselves considerately outside the picture.  Only Celia sat there, and at her feet, gazing up again into her face as in the forest, the man whose whole being had been consecrated to her service, her worship, by the kiss.

“You’ve passed it now.  I was trying to point out the Jumel house to you—­where Aaron Burr lived, you know.”

Theron roused himself from his day-dream, and nodded with a confused smile at his neighbor.  “Thanks,” he faltered; “I didn’t hear you.  The train makes such a noise, and I must have been dozing.”

He looked about him.  The night aspect, as of a tramps’ lodging-house, had quite disappeared from the car.  Everybody was sitting up; and the more impatient were beginning to collect their bundles and hand-bags from the racks and floor.  An expressman came through, jangling a huge bunch of brass checks on leathern thongs over his arm, and held parley with passengers along the aisle.  Outside, citified streets, with stores and factories, were alternating in the moving panorama with open fields; and, even as he looked, these vacant spaces ceased altogether, and successive regular lines of pavement, between two tall rows of houses all alike, began to stretch out, wheel to the right, and swing off out of view, for all the world like the avenues of hop-poles he remembered as a boy.  Then was a long tunnel, its darkness broken at stated intervals by brief bursts of daylight from overhead, and out of this all at once the train drew up its full length in some vast, vaguely lighted enclosure, and stopped.

“Yes, this is New York,” said the man, folding up his paper, and springing to his feet.  The narrow aisle was filled with many others who had been prompter still; and Theron stood, bag in hand, waiting till this energetic throng should have pushed itself bodily past him forth from the car.  Then he himself made his way out, drifting with a sense of helplessness in their resolute wake.  There rose in his mind the sudden conviction that he would be too late.  All the passengers in the forward sleepers would be gone before he could get there.  Yet even this terror gave him no new power to get ahead of anybody else in the tightly packed throng.

Once on the broad platform, the others started off briskly; they all seemed to know just where they wanted to go, and to feel that no instant of time was to be lost in getting there.  Theron himself caught some of this urgent spirit, and hurled himself along in the throng with reckless haste, knocking his bag against peoples’ legs, but never pausing for apology or comment until he found himself abreast of the locomotive at the head of the train.  He drew aside from the main current here, and began searching the platform, far and near, for those he had travelled so far to find.