like the colourless
vibration about a flame; and the opulent landscape seemed to droop under
it. But to Charity the heat was a stimulant: it enveloped the whole
world in the same glow that burned at her heart. Now and then a lurch of
the train flung her against Harney, and through her thin muslin she felt
the touch of his sleeve. She steadied herself, their eyes met, and the
flaming breath of the day seemed to enclose them.

The train roared into the Nettleton station, the descending mob caught
them on its tide, and they were swept out into a vague dusty square
thronged with seedy "hacks" and long curtained omnibuses drawn by horses
with tasselled fly-nets over their withers, who stood swinging their
depressed heads drearily from side to side.

A mob of 'bus and hack drivers were shouting "To the Eagle House,"
"To the Washington House," "This way to the Lake," "Just starting for
Greytop;" and through their yells came the popping of fire-crackers,
the explosion of torpedoes, the banging of toy-guns, and the crash of
a firemen's band trying to play the Merry Widow while they were being
packed into a waggonette streaming with bunting.

The ramshackle wooden hotels about the square were all hung with flags
and paper lanterns, and as Harney and Charity turned into the main
street, with its brick and granite business blocks crowding out the old
low-storied shops, and its towering poles strung with innumerable wires
that seemed to tremble and buzz in the heat, they saw the double line of
flags and lanterns tapering away gaily to the park at the other end of
the perspective. The noise and colour of this holiday vision seemed to
transform Nettleton into a metropolis. Charity could not believe
that Springfield or even Boston had anything grander to show, and
she wondered if, at this very moment, Annabel Balch, on the arm of
as brilliant a young man, were threading her way through scenes as
resplendent.

"Where shall we go first?" Harney asked; but as she turned her happy
eyes on him he guessed the answer and said: "We'll take a look round,
shall we?"

The street swarmed with their fellow-travellers, with other
excursionists arriving from other directions, with Nettleton's own
population, and with the mill-hands trooping in from the factories on
the Creston. The shops were closed, but one would scarcely have noticed
it, so numerous were the glass doors swinging open on saloons, on
restaurants, on drug-stores gushing from ev