endless perspective.  Yet in that glance he certainly took in the fact that the sidewalks were blocked with people and wondered if it were a holiday.  If so, it must be an enforced one, for the faces showed little joy.  Possibly a strike was on.  The anxiety he everywhere saw pictured on young faces and old, argued some trouble; but if the trouble was that, why were all heads turned indifferently from the Works, and why were the Works themselves in full blast?

These questions he may have asked himself and he may not.  His attention was entirely centred on the house he saw before him and on the possible developments awaiting him there.  Nothing else mattered.  Briskly he stepped out along the sandy road, and after a turn or two which led him quite away from the Works and its surrounding buildings, he came out upon the highway and this house.

It was a low and unpretentious one, and had but one distinguishing feature.  The porch which hung well over the doorstep was unique in shape and gave an air of picturesqueness to an otherwise simple exterior; a picturesqueness which was much enhanced in its effect by the background of illimitable forest, which united the foreground of this pleasing picture with the great chain of hills which held the Works and town in its ample basin.

As he approached the doorstep, his mind involuntarily formed an anticipatory image of the child whose first stitches in embroidery were like a fairy’s weaving to the strong man who worked in ore and possibly figured out bridges.  That she would prove to be of the anemic type, common among working girls gifted with an imagination they have but scant opportunity to exercise, he had little doubt.

He was therefore greatly taken aback, when at his first step upon the porch, the door before him flew open and he beheld in the dark recess beyond a young woman of such bright and blooming beauty that he hardly noticed her expression of extreme anxiety, till she lifted her hand and laid an admonitory finger softly on her lip: 

“Hush!” she whispered, with an earnestness which roused him from his absorption and restored him to the full meaning of this encounter.  “There is sickness in the house and we are very anxious.  Is your errand an important one?  If not—­” The faltering break in the fresh, young voice, the look she cast behind her into the darkened interior, were eloquent with the hope that he would recognise her impatience and pass on.

And so he might have done,—­so he would have done under all ordinary circumstances.  But if this was Doris—­and he did not doubt the fact after the first moment of startled surprise—­how dare he forego this opportunity of settling the question which had brought him here.

With a slight stammer but otherwise giving no evidence of the effect made upon him by the passionate intensity with which she had urged this plea, he assured her that his errand was important, but one so quickly told that it would delay her but a moment.  “But first,” said he, with very natural caution, “let me make sure that it is to Miss Doris Scott I am speaking.  My errand is to her and her only.”