How long they seemed to wait.  And then slowly beginning to move, they were off again, shaking, pounding, screaming through the night.  He drew his curtain from time to time and looked out.  There was the lurid sky line of the wooded range along the base of which they were crawling.  There was the Susquehannah, gleaming in the moon-light.  There was a stretch of level valley with silent farm houses, the occupants all at rest, without trouble, without anxiety.  There was a church, a graveyard, a mill, a village; and now, without pause or fear, the train had mounted a trestle-work high in air and was creeping along the top of it while a swift torrent foamed a hundred feet below.

What would the morning bring?  Even while he was flying to her, her gentle spirit might have gone on another flight, whither he could not follow her.  He was full of foreboding.  He fell at length into a restless doze.  There was a noise in his ears as of a rushing torrent when a stream is swollen by a freshet in the spring.  It was like the breaking up of life; he was struggling in the consciousness of coming death:  when Ruth stood by his side, clothed in white, with a face like that of an angel, radiant, smiling, pointing to the sky, and saying, “Come.”  He awoke with a cry—­the train was roaring through a bridge, and it shot out into daylight.

When morning came the train was industriously toiling along through the fat lands of Lancaster, with its broad farms of corn and wheat, its mean houses of stone, its vast barns and granaries, built as if, for storing the riches of Heliogabalus.  Then came the smiling fields of Chester, with their English green, and soon the county of Philadelphia itself, and the increasing signs of the approach to a great city.  Long trains of coal cars, laden and unladen, stood upon sidings; the tracks of other roads were crossed; the smoke of other locomotives was seen on parallel lines; factories multiplied; streets appeared; the noise of a busy city began to fill the air;—­and with a slower and slower clank on the connecting rails and interlacing switches the train rolled into the station and stood still.

It was a hot August morning.  The broad streets glowed in the sun, and the white-shuttered houses stared at the hot thoroughfares like closed bakers’ ovens set along the highway.  Philip was oppressed with the heavy air; the sweltering city lay as in a swoon.  Taking a street car, he rode away to the northern part of the city, the newer portion, formerly the district of Spring Garden, for in this the Boltons now lived, in a small brick house, befitting their altered fortunes.

He could scarcely restrain his impatience when he came in sight of the house.  The window shutters were not “bowed”; thank God, for that.  Ruth was still living, then.  He ran up the steps and rang.  Mrs. Bolton met him at the door.

“Thee is very welcome, Philip.”

“And Ruth?”