[figure description] Page 192.[end figure description]

Jubilation! Jubilation now, instead of Consternation,
in the office of Mr. Benjamin Brummage in
Wall Street.

President Brummage had convoked his Directors
to hear the First Semiannual Report of the new
Superintendent and Dictator of Dunderbunk.

And there they sat around the green table, no
longer forlorn and dreading a failure, but all chuckling
with satisfaction over their prosperity.

They were a happy and hilarious family now, —
so hilarious that the President was obliged to be
always rapping to Orderr with his paper-knife.

Every one of these gentlemen was proud of himself
as a Director of so successful a Company.
The Dunderbunk advertisement might now consider
itself as permanent in the newspapers, and
the Treasurer had very unnecessarily inserted the
notice of a dividend, which everybody knew of
already.

When Mr. Churm was not by, they all claimed
the honor of having discovered Wade, or at least
of having been the first to appreciate him.

They all invited him to dinner, — the others at
their houses, Sam Gwelp at his club.

They had not yet begun to wax fat and kick.
They still remembered the panic of last summer.

[figure description] Page 193.[end figure description]

They passed a unanimous vote of the most complimentary
confidence in Wade, approved of his system,
forced upon him an increase of salary, and
began to talk of “launching out” and doubling
their capital. In short, they behaved as Directors
do when all is serene.

Churm and Wade had a hearty laugh over the
absurdities of the Board and all their vague propositions.

“Dunderbunk,” said Churm, “was a company
started on a sentimental basis, as many others are.”

“Mr. Brummage fell in love with pig-iron?”

“Precisely. He had been a dry-goods jobber,
risen from a retailer somewhere in the country.
He felt a certain lack of dignity in his work. He
wanted to deal in something more masculine than
lace and ribbons. He read a sentimental article
on Iron in the `Journal of Commerce': how Iron
held the world together; how it was nerve and
sinew; how it was ductile and malleable and other
things that sounded big; how without Iron civilization
would stop, and New-Zealanders hunt rats
among the ruins of London; how anybody who
would make two tons of Iron grow where one
grew before was a benefactor to the human race
greater than Alexander, Cæsar, or Napoleon; and
so on, — you know the eloquent style. Brummage's
soul was fired. He determined to be
greater than the three heroes named. He was
oozing with unoccupied capital. He went about
among the other rich jobbers, with the newspaper

[figure description] Page 194.[end figure description]

article in his hand, and fired their souls. They
determined to be great Iron-Kings, — magnificent
thought! They wanted to read in the newspapers,
`If all the iron rails made at the Dunderbunk
Works in the last six months were put together in
a straight line, they would reach twice round our
terraqueous globe and seventy-three miles two
rails over.' So on that poetic foundation they
started the concern.”

Wade laughed. “But how did you happen to
be with them?”

“Oh! my friend Damer sold them the land for
the shop and took stock in payment. I came into
the Board as his executor. Did I never tell you
so before?”

“No.”

“Well, then, be informed that it was in Miss
Damer's behalf that you knocked down Friend
Tarbox, and so got your skates for saving her
property. It 's quite a romance already, Richard,
my boy! and I suppose you feel immensely bored
that you had to come down and meet us old chaps,
instead of tumbling at her feet on the ice again to-day.”

“A tumble in this wet day would be a cold bath
to romance.”

The Gulf Stream had sent up a warm spoil-sport
rain that morning. It did not stop, but poured
furiously the whole day.

From Cohoes to Spuyten Duyvil, on both sides
of the river, all the skaters swore at the weather,

[figure description] Page 195.[end figure description]

as profane persons no doubt did when the windows
of heaven were opened in Noah's time. The
skateresses did not swear, but savagely said, “It
is too bad,” — and so it was.

Wade, loaded with the blessings of his Directors,
took the train next morning for Dunderbunk.

The weather was still mild and drizzly, but
promised to clear. As the train rattled along by
the river, Wade could see that the thin ice was
breaking up everywhere. In mid-stream a procession
of blocks was steadily drifting along. Unless
Zero came sliding down again pretty soon
from Boreal regions, the sheets that filled the coves
and clung to the shores would also sail away southward,
and the whole Hudson be left clear as in mid-summer.

At Yonkers a down train ranged by the side of
Wade's train, and, looking out he saw Mr. and
Mrs. Skerrett alighting.

He jumped down, rather surprised, to speak to
them.

“We have just been telegraphed here,” said
Peter, gravely. “The son of a widow, a friend of
ours, was drowned this morning in the soft ice of
the river. He was a pet of mine, poor fellow! and
the mother depends upon me for advice. We have
come down to say a kind word. Why won't you
report us to the ladies at my house, and say we
shall not be at home until the evening train?
They do not know the cause of our journey except
that it is a sad one.”

[figure description] Page 196.[end figure description]

“Perhaps Mr. Wade will carve their turkey for
them at dinner, Peter,” Fanny suggested.

“Do, Wade! and keep their spirits up. Dinner
's at six.”

Here the engine whistled. Wade promised to
“shine substitute” at his friend's board, and took
his place again. The train galloped away.

Peter and his wife exchanged a bright look over
the fortunate incident of this meeting, and went on
their kind way to carry sympathy and such consolation
as might be to the widow.

The train galloped northward. Until now, the
beat of its wheels, like the click of an enormous
metronome, had kept time to jubilant measures
singing in Wade's brain. He was hurrying back,
exhilarated with success, to the presence of a
woman whose smile was finer exhilaration than any
number of votes of confidence, passed unanimously
by any number of conclaves of overjoyed Directors,
and signed by Brummage after Brummage, with
the signature of a capitalist in a flurry of delight
at a ten per cent dividend.

But into this joyous mood of Wade's the thought
of death suddenly intruded. He could not keep a
picture of death and drowning out of his mind. As
the train sprang along and opened gloomy breadth
after breadth of the leaden river, clogged with slow-drifting
files of ice-blocks, he found himself staring
across the dreary waste and forever fancying some
one sinking there, helpless and alone.

He seemed to see a brave, bright-eyed, ruddy

[figure description] Page 197.[end figure description]

boy, venturing out carelessly along the edges of
the weakened ice. Suddenly the ice gives way, the
little figure sinks, rises, clutches desperately at a
fragment, struggles a moment, is borne along in the
relentless flow of the chilly water, stares in vain
shoreward, and so sinks again with a look of
agony, and is gone.

But whenever this inevitable picture grew before
Wade's eyes, as the drowning figure of his fancy
vanished, it suddenly changed features, and presented
the face of Mary Damer, perishing beyond
succor.

Of course he knew that this was but a morbid
vision. Yet that it came at all, and that it so agonized
him, proved the force of his new feeling.

He had not analyzed it before. This thought of
death became its touchstone.

Men like Wade, strong, healthy, earnest, concentrated,
straightforward, isolated, judge men and
women as friends or foes at once and once for all.
He had recognized in Mary Damer from the first a
heart as true, whole, noble, and healthy as his own.
A fine instinct had told him that she was waiting
for her hero, as he was for his heroine.

So he suddenly loved her. And yet not suddenly;
for all his life, and all his lesser forgotten or
discarded passions, had been training him for this
master one.

He suddenly and strongly loved her; and yet it
had only been a beautiful bewilderment of uncomprehended
delight, until this haunting vision of her

[figure description] Page 198.[end figure description]

fair face sinking amid the hungry ice beset him.
Then he perceived what would be lost to him, if
she were lost.

The thought of Death placed itself between him
and Love. If the love had been merely a pretty
remembrance of a charming woman, he might have
dismissed his fancied drowning scene with a little
emotion of regret. Now, the fancy was an agony.

He had too much power over himself to entertain
it long. But the grisly thought came uninvited,
returned undesired, and no resolute Avaunt,
even backed by that magic wand, a cigar, availed
to banish it wholly.

The sky cleared cold at eleven o'clock. A sharp
wind drew through the Highlands. As the train
rattled round the curve below the tunnel through
Skerrett's Point, Wade could see his skating course
of Christmas-Day with the ladies. Firm ice, glazed
smooth by the sudden chill after the rain, filled the
Cove and stretched beyond the Point into the river.

It was treacherous stuff, beautiful to the eyes of
a skater, but sure to be weak, and likely to break
up any moment and join the deliberate headlong
drift of the masses in mid-current.

Wade almost dreaded lest his vision should suddenly
realize itself, and he should see his enthusiastic
companion of the other day sailing gracefully
along to certain death.

Nothing living, however, was in sight, except
here and there a crow, skipping about in the floating
ice.

[figure description] Page 199.[end figure description]

The lover was greatly relieved. He could now
forewarn the lady against the peril he had imagined.
The train in a moment dropped him at Dunderbunk.
He hurried to the Foundry and wrote a note to
Mrs. Damer.

“Mr. Wade presents his compliments to Mrs.
Damer, and has the honor to inform her that Mr.
Skerrett has nominated him carver to the ladies to-day
in their host's place.

“Mr. Wade hopes that Miss Damer will excuse
him from his engagement to skate with her this
afternoon. The ice is dangerous, and Miss Damer
should on no account venture upon it.”

Perry Purtett was the bearer of this billet. He
swaggered into Peter Skerrett's hall, and dreadfully
alarmed the fresh-imported Englishman who answered
the bell, by ordering him in a severe tone, —

“Hurry up now, White Cravat, with that answer!
I 'm wanted down to the Works. Steam don't
bile when I 'm off; and the fly-wheel will never
buzz another turn, unless I 'm there to motion it
to move on.”

Mrs. Damer's gracious reply informed Wade
“that she should be charmed to see him at dinner,
etc., and would not fail to transmit his kind warning
to Miss Damer, when she returned from her
drive to make calls.”

But when Miss Damer returned in the afternoon,
her mother was taking a gentle nap over the violet,
indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red stripes of a
gorgeous Afghan she was knitting. The daughter

[figure description] Page 200.[end figure description]

heard nothing of the billet. The house was lonely
without Fanny Skerrett. Mr. Wade did not come
at the appointed hour. Mary was not willing to
say to herself how much she regretted his absence.

Had he forgotten the appointment?

No, — that was a thought not to be tolerated.

“A gentleman does not forget,” she thought.
And she had a thorough confidence, besides, that
this gentleman was very willing to remember.

She read a little, fitfully, sang fitfully, moved
about the house uneasily; and at last, when it grew
late, and she was bored and Wade did not arrive,
she pronounced to herself that he had been detained
in town.

This point settled, she took her skates, put on
her pretty Amazonian hat with its alert feather,
and went down to waste her beauty and grace on
the ice, unattended and alone.