nd lighted buildings of the
lower city--had watched them gleam in a thousand ripples across the
dark river, ripples that lay and moved like silver and golden serpents
along the water. Back presently they had turned, approaching once more
the stately towers that touched the sky, and this time they had sought
a new angle. Over to the Jersey shore their blunt-nosed ferryboat had
taken them, and thence north along the river to Twenty-third Street,
seeing the gold and velvet-black city slide southward as in a dream.

On all this Helen was now indefinitely reflecting, and of the man with
whom she had seen it first she perhaps thought a little. But those
were oblique thoughts, and hardly worth the name. All the experiences
and impressions of the day--Isabel's departure from home, the wedding,
the grave face of the old minister, the silence of the dim room in the
parsonage, Charlie's subsequent comments, the dinner _a trois_--all
these mingled in her mind, and somehow seemed a part of the great night
into which she gazed.

Yet there was an undercurrent of vague dissatisfaction in her
reflections. All these things were true and vital, and she had been
only a spectator, a visitor at the fair. Life had surged around her,
but had touched her not at all, or lightly at best. Unconsciously her
thoughts toward the sleeping city were as though she offered herself to
it and to the life that bound it and swept through its veins.
Presently, across the water, a clock began to strike the
hour--midnight--and softened by the distance, the chimes came gently
across the intervening space.

Helen roused herself a moment: midnight! Yet the blood that flushed
her cheeks showed that sleep for her was still afar off. And so she
sat, unmoving, while in the darkness above her the myriad stars moved
slowly in their majestic courses.

CHAPTER XIX

The bringing of order out of chaos is one of the most interesting and
also one of the most satisfying employments a person can have.
Likewise it is usually one of the most exhausting, if the chaos has
been really chaos and the order be really order. But the satisfaction
of seeing, as the clouds break and the skies clear, the salient outline
of the thing appear as it ought to appear is sufficient compensation
for all the effort. Even if the work be no more elevated than washing
up a trayful of soiled china, a certain thrill is there at the
successful completion of the task; and the greater