four o'clock
It is no matter , here , what arrangements had been made between the two for their subsequent meeting and correspondence ; it is enough to know that no fetter has yet been forged by any Tubal Cain of them all , strong enough to hold apart those who choose to single out each other from the world . Tom Leslie and Josephine Harris were to meet again , and at an early day ; and with that understanding both were reasonably well content -- the male member of the combination because he had no option , and the female member because she really had such a multitude of benevolent plans in her busy brain that she had no time to be otherwise . 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 , -LRB- 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 -RRB- -- 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 -LRB- for propriety 's sake -RRB- 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 . No one who has ever travelled among the mountains or through any of the Northern hill-sections , needs any description of the heavy lumbering `` Concord coach '' in which the young girl and her stage-companions were slowly dragged up Genesee Street , Utica , by four horses of lymphatic temperament , on that sultry July afternoon with occasional sprinkles of shower thrown in to make it endurable .