—­graceful as the mountain doe,
      That sniffs the forest air,
    Bringing the smell of the heather bell,
      In the tresses of her hair.

They met, they clasped hands, they looked into each other’s eyes, and something sweet and subtle passed between them.  “I am so glad, so glad to see you,” said John, and Miss Harlow said the same words, and then added, “Where have you been?  I have missed you so much.”

“And, Oh, how happy I am to hear that you have missed me!  I have been away to the North—­on the road to Iceland.  May I call on you this evening, and tell you about my journey?”

“Yes, indeed!  If you will pleasure me so far, I will send an excuse to Lady Thirsk, and stay at home to listen to you.”

“That would be a miraculous favor.  May I come early?”

“We dine early.  Come and take your dinner with us.  Mother will be glad to see you and to hear your adventures, and mother’s pleasure is my greatest happiness.”

“Then I will come.”

As he spoke, he took out his watch and looked at it.  “I have an engagement in ten minutes,” he said.  “Will you excuse me now?”

“I will.  I wish I had an engagement.  Poor women!  They have bare lives.  I would like to go to business.  I would like to make money.  There are days in which I feel that I could run a thousand spindles or manage a department store very well and very happily.”

“Why do you talk of things impossible?  Good-bye!”

“Until seven o’clock?”

“Until seven.”

He had dismounted to speak to her and, holding Bendigo’s bridle, had walked with her to the Harlow residence.  He now said, “Good-bye,” and the light of a true, passionate lover was on his face, as he leaped into the saddle.  She watched him out of sight and then went into her home, and with an inscrutable smile, began to arrange the ferns and bluebells in a vase of cream-colored wedgewood.

In the meantime John had reached the Hatton mill, and after his long absence he looked up at it with conscious pride.  It was built of brick; it was ten stories high; every story was full of windows, every story airy as a bird-cage.  Certainly it was not a thing of architectural beauty, but it was a grandly organized machine where brains and hands, iron and steel worked together for a common end.  As John entered its big iron gates, he saw bales of cotton going into the mill by one door, and he knew the other door at which they would come out in the form of woven calico.  In rapid thought he followed them to the upper floors, and then traveled down with them to the great weaving-rooms in the order their processes advanced them.  He knew that on the highest floor a devil would tear the fiber asunder, that it would then go to the scutcher, and have the dust and dirt blown away, then that carding machines would lay all the fibers parallel, that drawing machines would group them into slender ribbons, and a roving machine twist them into a soft cord, and then that a mule or a throstle would spin the roving into yarn, and the yarn would go to the weaving-rooms, where a thousand wonderful machines would turn them into miles and miles of calico; the machines doing all the hard work, while women and girls adjusted and supplied them with the material.