She made a most picturesque picture as she sat there, in her severe black gown and quaint little black bonnet, on the stone wall, surrounded by the bright vines and leaves; her lap full of them, the ground at her feet strewed with them, her little black-gloved hands deftly arranging and rearranging them.  She looked as if she might be a nun, who had run away from her cloister, and coming for the first time in her life upon gay gauds of color, in strange fabrics, had sat herself down instantly to weave and work with them, unaware that she was on a highway.

This was the picture that Stephen White saw, as he came slowly up the road on his way home after an unusually wearying day.  He slackened his pace, and, perceiving how entirely unconscious Mercy was of his approach, deliberately studied her, feature, dress, attitude,—­all, as scrutinizingly as if she had been painted on canvas and hanging on a wall.

“Upon my word,” he said to himself, “she isn’t bad-looking, after all.  I’m not sure that she isn’t pretty.  If she hadn’t that inconceivable bonnet on her head,—­yes, she is very pretty.  Her mouth is bewitching.  I declare, I believe she is beautiful,” were Stephen’s successive verdicts, as he drew nearer and nearer to Mercy.  Mercy was thinking of him at that very moment,—­was thinking of him with a return of the annoyance and mortification which had stung her at intervals all day, whenever she recalled their interview of the previous evening.  Mercy combined, in a very singular manner, some of the traits of an impulsive nature with those of an unimpulsive one.  She did things, said things, and felt things with the instantaneous intensity of the poetic temperament; but she was quite capable of looking at them afterward, and weighing them with the cool and unbiassed judgment of the most phlegmatic realist.  Hence she often had most uncomfortable seasons, in which one side of her nature took the other side to task, scorned it and berated it severely; holding up its actions to its remorseful view, as an elder sister might chide a younger one, who was incorrigibly perverse and wayward.

“It was about as silly a thing as you ever did in your life.  He must have thought you a perfect fool to have supposed he had come down to meet you,” she was saying to herself at the very moment when the sound of Stephen’s footsteps first reached her ear, and caused her to look up.  The sight of his face at that particular moment was so startling and so unpleasant to her that it deprived her of all self-possession.  She gave a low cry, her face was flooded with crimson, and she sprang from the wall so hastily that her leaves and vines flew in every direction.

“I am very sorry I frightened you so, Mrs. Philbrick,” said Stephen, quite unconscious of the true source of her confusion.  “I was just on the point of speaking, when you heard me.  I ought to have spoken before, but you made so charming a picture sitting there among the leaves and vines that I could not resist looking at you a little longer.”