The house had been for several years occupied by families of mill operatives, and had gradually acquired that indefinable, but unmistakable tenement-house look, which not even neatness and good repair can wholly banish from a house.  The orchard behind the house had so run down for want of care that it looked more like a tangle of wild trees than like any thing which had ever been an orchard.  Yet the Roxbury Russets and Baldwins of that orchard had once been Billy Jacobs’s great pride, the one point of hospitality which his miserliness never conquered.  Long after it would have broken his heart to set out a generous dinner for a neighbor, he would feast him on choice apples, and send him away with a big basket full in his hands.  Now every passing school-boy helped himself to the wan, withered, and scanty fruit; and nobody had thought it worth while to mend the dilapidated fences which might have helped to shut them out.

Even Mrs. White, with all her indifference to externals, rebelled at first at the idea of going to live in the old Jacobs house.

“I’ll never go there, Stephen,” she said petulantly.  “I’m not going to live in half a house with the mill people; and it’s no better than a barn, the hideous, old, faded, yellow thing!”

If it crossed Stephen’s mind that there was a touch of late retribution in his mother’s having come at last to a sense of suffering because she must live in an unsightly house, he did not betray it.

He replied very gently.  He was never heard to speak other than gently to his mother, though to every one else his manner was sometimes brusque and dictatorial.

“But, mother, I think we must.  It is the only way that we can be sure of the rent.  And, if we live ourselves in one half of it, we shall find it much easier to get good tenants for the other part.  I promise you none of the mill people shall ever live there again.  Please do not make it hard for me, mother.  We must do it.”

When Stephen said “must,” his mother never gainsaid him.  He was only twenty-five, but his will was stronger than hers,—­as much stronger as his temper was better.  Persons judging hastily, by her violent assertions and vehement statements of her determination, as contrasted with Stephen’s gentle, slow, almost hesitating utterance of his opinions or intentions, might have assumed that she would always conquer; but it was not so.  In all little things, Stephen was her slave, because she was a suffering invalid and his mother.  But, in all important decisions, he was the master; and she recognized it, and leaned upon it in a way which was almost ludicrous in its alternation with her petulance and perpetual dictating to him in trifles.

And so they went to live in the old Jacobs house.  They took the northern half of it, the part in which the sea captain and his wife had lived.  This half of the house was not so pleasant as the other, had less sun, and had no door upon the street; but it was smaller and better suited to their needs, and moreover, Stephen said to his mother,—­