Before Josephine Harris had finished her capital dinner at the American, and ceased trifling with those magnificent strawberries, the finest of any season within memory, (that young person was favored with a most unromantic appetite, and often managed to astonish those who had the pleasure of paying her bills at a restaurant dinner or supper)--before all this was accomplished, and before the bell had rung, calling the passengers for the Northward to resume their seats on the train, Leslie had succeeded in discovering the whereabouts of the proper stage for the remainder of Miss Josey's journey, and making the necessary arrangements for her baggage and her personal accommodation. This done, and his mind at rest on that particular point, the bell rung, the two made a hurried farewell, in which a warm pressure of the hand served (for propriety's sake) in the place of a parting kiss understood; and Leslie sprung into his car and was whirled away Northward towards the Mecca of American summer-tourists; while the young girl went up to "do" Utica in a bird's-eye view from the window of her room, and to await the four o'clock that was to bear her away in the lumbering stage to West Falls. Perhaps Tom Leslie felt at that moment that he would have been glad of any excuse or any shadow of invitation to accompany her to that rustic paradise, instead of going away alone to any paradise named in Bible or Koran; and perhaps Joe Harris had the faintest suspicion of a heavy and lonely feeling at her heart, at parting with the "eyes" and the merry brain that lay behind them, so suddenly flung as an element into her own existence. Henceforward, for the present, the business of this narration only requires that the course of Miss Josephine Harris shall be traced, leaving the "other half" of her incomplete "pair of scissors" to be picked up hereafter.