“Yes, Fanny; but sometimes words help us to remember things.  It is a great point gained when we have learned to hoe the potatoes in our own fields, and not vex our souls about our neighbor’s towers.”

Hope Wayne was not in the least abstracted.  She was nervously alive to every thing that was said and done; and listened with a smile to Lawrence Newt’s parable, liking him more and more.

The general restless distraction that precedes the breaking up of a party had now set in.  People were moving, and rustling, and breaking off the ends of conversation.  They began to go.  A few said good-evening, and had had such a charming time!  The rest gradually followed, until there was a universal departure.  Grace Plumer was leaning upon Sligo Moultrie’s arm.  But where was Abel?

Hope Wayne’s eyes looked every where.  But her only glimpse of him during the evening had been that glimmering, dreadful moment in the conservatory.  There he had remained ever since.  There he still stood gazing through the door into the drawing-room, seeing but not seen—­his mind a wild whirl of thoughts.

“What a fool I am!” thought Abel, bitterly.  He was steadily asking himself, “Have—­I—­lost—­Hope Wayne—­before—­I—­had—­won—­her?”

CHAPTER XIX.

DOG-DAYS.

The great city roared, and steamed, and smoked.  Along the hot, glaring streets by the river a few panting people hurried, clinging to the house wall for a thin strip of shade, too narrow even to cover their feet.  All the windows of the stores were open, and within the offices, with a little thinking, a little turn of the pen, and a little tracing in ink, men were magically warding off impending disaster, or adding thousands to the thousands accumulated already—­men, too, were writing without thinking, mechanically copying or posting, scribbling letters of form, with heads clear or heads aching, with hearts burning or cold; full of ambition and hope, or vaguely remembering country hill-sides and summer rambles—­a day’s fishing—­a night’s frolic—­Sunday-school—­singing-school, and the girl with the chip hat garlanded with sweet-brier; hearts longing and loving, regretting, hoping, and remembering, and all the while the faces above them calm and smooth, and the hands below them busily doing their part of the great work of the world.

In Wall Street there was restless running about.  Men in white clothes and straw-hats darted in at doors, darted out of doors—­carrying little books, and boxes, and bundles in their hands, nodding to each other as they passed, but all infected with the same fever; with brows half-wrinkled or tied up in hopeless seams of perplexity; with muttering pale lips, or lips round and red, and clearly the lips of clerks who had no great stakes at issue—­a general rushing and hurrying as if every body were haunted by the fear of arriving too late every where, and losing all possible chances in every direction.