Not a word of the freshet; of the frightful loss; of the change of plans for the summer; of the weeks of delay and the uncertain financial outlook!  And alas, dear reader—­not a syllable, as you have perhaps noticed, of poor daddy tottering on the brink of bankruptcy; nor the slightest reference to brave young women going out alone in the cold, cold world to earn their bread!  What were floods, earthquakes, cyclones, poverty, debt—­what was anything that might, could, would or should happen, compared to the joy of their plighted troth!

CHAPTER XXII

Summer has come:  along the banks of the repentant stream the willows are in full leaf; stretches of grass, braving the coal smoke and dust hide the ugly red earth.  The roads are dry again; the slopes of the “fill” once more are true; all the arches in the mouth of the tunnel are finished; the tracks have been laid and the first train has crawled out on the newly tracked road where it haggled, snorted and stopped, only to crawl back and be swallowed by The Beast.

And with the first warm day came Miss Felicia.  “When your wretched, abominable roads, my dear, dry up so that a body can walk without sinking up to their neck in mud—­” ran Miss Felicia’s letter in answer to Ruth’s invitation,—­“I’ll come down for the night,” and she did, bringing Ruth half of her laces, now that she was determined to throw herself away on “that good-for nothing—­ Yes, Jack, I mean you and nobody else, and you needn’t stand there laughing at me, for every word of it’s true; for what in the world you two babes in the wood are going to live on no mortal man knows;” Ruth answering with her arm tight around the dear lady’s neck,—­a liberty nobody,—­not even Peter, ever dared take—­and a whisper in her ear that Jack was the blessedest ever, and that she loved him so sometimes she was well-nigh distracted—­a statement which the old lady remarked was literally true.

And we may be sure that Peter came too—­and we may be equally positive that no impassable roads could have held him back.  Indeed, on the very afternoon of the very day following the receipt of the joyful telegram, he had closed his books with a bang, performed the Moses act until he had put them into the big safe, slipped on his coat, given an extra brush to his hat and started for the ferry.  All that day his face had been in a broad smile; even the old book-keeper noticed it and so did Patrick, the night-watchman and sometimes porter; and so did the line of depositors who inched along to his window and were greeted with a flash-light play of humor on his face instead of the more sedate, though equally kindly expression which always rested on his features when at work.  But that was nothing to the way he hugged Jack and Ruth—­separately—­together—­then Ruth, then Jack—­and then both together again, only stopping at MacFarlane, whose hand he grabbed with a “Great day! hey?  Great day!  By Cricky, Henry, these are the things that put new wine into old leather bottles like you and me.”