oddest tricks of a brain preoccupied with the image of one human being.  One would think that it would make the eye clearer-sighted, well-nigh infallible, in the recognition of the loved form.  Not at all.  Waiting for her lover to appear, a woman will stand wearily watching at a window, and think fifty times in sixty minutes that she sees him coming.  Tall men, short men, dark men, light men; men with Spanish cloaks, and men in surtouts,—­all wear, at a little distance, a tantalizing likeness to the one whom they in no wise resemble.

After such a watching as this, the very eye becomes disordered, as after looking at a bright color it sees a spectrum of a totally different tint; and, when the long looked-for person appears, he himself looks unnatural at first, and strange.  How well many women know this curious fact in love’s optics!  I doubt if men ever watch long enough, and longingly enough, for a woman’s coming, to be so familiar with the phenomenon.  Stephen White, however, had more than once during these four weeks quickened his pace to overtake some slender figure clad in black, never doubting that it was Mercy Philbrick, until he came so near that his eyes were forced to tell him the truth.  It was truly a strange thing that he and Mercy did not once meet during all these weeks.  It was no doubt an important element in the growth of their relation, this interval of unacknowledged and combated curiosity about each other.  Nature has a myriad of ways of bringing about her results.  Seed-time and harvest are constant, and the seasons all keep their routine; but no two fields have the same method or measure in the summer’s or the winter’s dealings.  Hearts lie fallow sometimes; and seeds of love swell very big in the ground, all undisturbed and unsuspected.

When Mercy and her mother drove up to the house, Stephen was standing at his mother’s window.  It was just at dusk.

“Here they are, mother,” he said.  “I think I will go out and meet them.”

Mrs. White lifted her eyes very slowly towards her son, and spoke in the measured syllables and unvibrating tone which always marked her utterance when she was displeased.

“Do you think you are under any obligation to do that?  Suppose they had hired a house of you in some other part of the town:  would you have felt called upon to pay them that attention?  I do not know what the usual duties of a landlord are.  You know best.”

Stephen colored.  This was the worst of his mother’s many bad traits,—­an instinctive, unreasoning, and unreasonable jealousy of any mark of attention or consideration shown to any other person than herself, even if it did not in the smallest way interfere with her comfort; and this cold, sarcastic manner of speaking was, of all the forms of her ill-nature, the one he found most unbearable.  He made no reply, but stood still at the window, watching Mercy’s light and literally joyful movements, as she helped her mother out of, and down from, the antiquated old carriage, and carried parcel after parcel and laid them on the doorstep.