“No, you can do nothing for me,” replied Mrs. Jacobs, in a voice as unmoved as her face.  “He will never come back.  He will be drowned.”  And from that day no one ever heard her mention her son.  It was believed, however, that she had news from him, and that she sent him money; for, although the rents of her house were paid to her regularly, she grew if possible more and more penurious every year, allowing herself barely enough food to support life, and wearing such tattered and patched clothes that she was almost an object of terror to children when they met her in lonely fields and woods, bending down to the ground and searching for herbs like an old witch.  At one time, also, she went in great haste to a lawyer in the village, and with his assistance raised three thousand dollars on a mortgage on her house, mortgaging it very nearly to its full value.  In vain he represented to her that, in case the house should chance to stand empty for a year, she would have no money to pay the interest on her mortgage, and would lose the property.  She either could not understand, or did not care for what he said.  The house always had brought her in about so many dollars a year; she believed it always would; at any rate, she wanted this money.  And so it came to pass that the mortgage on the old Jacobs house had come into Stephen White’s hands, and he was now living in one half of it, his own tenant and landlord at once, as he often laughingly said.

These old rumors and sayings about the Jacobs’s family history were running in Stephen’s head this evening, as he stood listlessly leaning on the gate, and looking down at the unsightly spot of bare earth still left where the gate had so long stood pressed back against the fence.

“I wonder how long it’ll take to get that old rut smooth and green like the rest of the yard,” he thought.  Stephen White absolutely hated ugliness.  It did not merely irritate and depress him, as it does everybody of fine fastidiousness:  he hated not only the sight of it, he hated it with a sort of unreasoning vindictiveness.  If it were a picture, he wanted to burn the picture, cut it, tear it, trample it under foot, get it off the face of the earth immediately, at any cost or risk.  It had no business to exist:  if nobody else would make way with it, he must.  He often saw places that he would have liked to devastate, to blot out of existence if he could, just because they were barren and unsightly.  Once, when he was a very little child, he suddenly seized a book of his father’s,—­an old, shabby, worn dictionary,—­and flung it into the fire with uncontrollable passion; and, on being asked why he did it, had nothing to say in justification of his act, except this extraordinary statement:  “It was an ugly book; it hurt me.  Ugly books ought to go in the fire.”  What the child suffered, and, still more, what the man suffered from this hatred of ugliness, no words could portray.  Ever since he could remember, he had been unhappy