t."

"Well, well! When was that?"

"All through the most important ten years of my life."

"Of your life! Good gracious! Which were they?"

"The first ten. A guile seemingly so guileless that yours, compared with
it, is botch work."

The two were still looking into each other's eyes when the latch clicked
and John Courteney stepped in.

XXV

"PLEASE ASSEMBLE"

Out from behind Fritz Island the _Votaress_ swept northward into a
deluge of light from a sun just finishing the first half of his
afternoon decline.

Before her lay, far and wide, an expanse of river and shore so fair,
without a noticeable sign of man's touch, that one traveller of
exceptional moral daring--conversing with the Gilmores and
Ramsey--personified the scene as "Nature in siesta." At the steamer's
approach the picture--or, as the daring traveller might have insisted,
the basking sleeper--seemed to awaken and in a repletion of smiling
content to stir and stretch and every here and there to darken and
lighten by turns as though closing and opening upon the intruder a
multitude of eyes as unnumbered as those of a human sort that looked on
the scene, the sleeper, from the beautiful boat.

So for several minutes. Then the _Votaress_ curved into the west till
the great twin shadows of her chimneys crept athwart the pilot-house and
texas, while more than one passenger of the kind who tell all they know
to whoever will hear said that yonder bright mass of cottonwoods and
willows, bathing in sunlight directly up the stream, with open water
shimmering all round it, was Glasscock Island; that Glasscock Towhead
lay hidden behind it just above, and that a towhead was an island in the
making. The whole view was such a stimulus to the outpouring of
sentiment as well as of information, that one young pair, each
succeeding flutter of whose heart-strings was more tenderly entangling
them, agreed in undertone that the river's incessant bendings were steps
of a Jacob's ladder with these resplendent white steamers for ascending
and descending angels.

"Yonder comes another now," said both at once. They pressed forward to
the foremost boiler-deck guards, among the many sitters and standers who
were trying to determine, by the ornamental form of the stranger's
chimney-tops or the peculiar note of her scape-pipes, before her name
might show out on paddle-box or pilot-house, whether she was the
_Chancellor_, the _Aleck Scott_, the _Belle Key_, or the _Ma