“I wonder if mother’ll take to them?  If she does, it will be a great comfort to her.  She ’s so alone.”  And Stephen’s face clouded, as he reflected how very seldom the monotony of the invalid’s life was broken now by a friendly visit from a neighbor.

“If they should turn out really social, neighborly people that we liked, we might move away the old side-board from before the hall door, and go in and out that way, as the Jacobses used to.  It would be unlucky though, I reckon, to use that door.  I guess I’ll plaster it up some day.”  Like all people of deep sentiment, Stephen had in his nature a vein of something which bordered on superstition.

The twilight deepened into darkness, and a cold mist began to fall in slow, drizzling drops.  Still Stephen stood, absorbed in his reverie, and unmindful of the chill.

The hall door opened, and an old woman peered out.  She held a lamp in one hand; the blast of cold air made the flame flicker and flare, and, as she put up one hand to shade it, the light was thrown sharply across her features, making them stand out like the distorted features of a hideous mask.

“Steve!  Steve!” she called, in a shrill voice.  “Supper’s been waitin’ more ‘n half an hour.  Lor’s sake, what’s the boy thinkin’ on now, I wonder?” she muttered in an impatient lower tone, as Stephen turned his head slowly.

“Yes, yes, Marty.  Tell my mother I will be there in a moment,” replied Stephen, as he walked slowly toward the house; even then noting, with the keen and relentless glance of a beauty-worshipper, how grotesquely ugly the old woman’s wrinkled face became, lighted up by the intense cross-light.  Old Marty’s face had never looked other than lovingly into Stephen’s since he first lay in her arms, twenty-five years ago, when she came, a smooth-cheeked, rosy country-woman of twenty-five, to nurse his mother at the time of his birth.  She had never left the home since.  With a faithfulness and devotion only to be accounted for by the existence of rare springs of each in her own nature, surely not by any uncommon lovableness in either Mr. or Mrs. White, or by any especial comforts in her situation, she had stayed on a quarter of a century, in the hard position of woman of all work in a poor family.  She worshipped Stephen, and, as I said, her face had never once looked other than lovingly into his; but he could not remember the time when he had not thought her hideous.  She had a big brown mole on her chin, out of which grew a few bristling hairs.  It was an unsightly thing, no doubt, on a woman’s chin; and sometimes, when Marty was very angry, the hairs did actually seem to bristle, as a cat’s whiskers do.  When Stephen could not speak plain, he used to point his little dimpled finger at this mole and say, “Do doe away,—­doe away;” and to this day it was a torment to him.  His eyes seemed morbidly drawn toward it at times..  When he was ill, and poor Marty bent over his bed, ministering to him as no one but a loving old nurse can, he saw only the mole, and had to make an effort not to shrink from her.  To-night, as she lingered on the threshold, affectionately waiting to light his path, he was thinking only of her ugliness.  But when she exclaimed, with the privileged irritability of an old servant,—­