“Why, yes, mother,” he said, “that would be very nice.  It is a long time since we had anybody to Christmas dinner.”

“Well, suppose you run in after tea and ask them,” replied Mrs. White, in the friendliest of tones.

“Yes, I’ll go,” answered Stephen, feeling as if he were a man talking in a dream.  “I have been meaning to go in ever since they came.”

After tea, Stephen sat counting the minutes till he should go.  To all appearances, he was buried in his newspaper, occasionally reading a paragraph aloud to his mother.  He thought it better that she should remind him of his intention to go; that the call should be purely at her suggestion.  The patience and silence with which he sat waiting for her to remember and speak of it were the very essence of deceit again,—­twice in this one hour an acted lie, of which his dulled conscience took no note or heed.  Fine and impalpable as the meshes of the spider’s-web are the bands and bonds of a habit of concealment; swift-growing, too, and in ever-widening circles, like the same glittering net woven for death.

At last Mrs. White said, “Steve, I think it’s getting near nine o’clock.  You’d better go in next door before it’s any later.”

Stephen pulled out his watch.  By his own sensations, he would have said that it must be midnight.

“Yes, it is half-past eight.  I suppose I had better go now,” he said, and bade his mother good-night.

He went out into the night with a sense of ecstasy of relief and joy.  He was bewildered at himself.  How this strong sentiment towards Mercy Philbrick had taken possession of him he could not tell.  He walked up and down in the snowy path in front of the house for some minutes, questioning himself, sounding with a delicious dread the depths of this strange sea in which he suddenly found himself drifting.  He went back to the day when Harley Allen’s letter first told him of the two women who might become his tenants.  He felt then a presentiment that a new element was to be introduced into his life; a vague, prophetic sense of some change at hand.  Then came the first interview, and his sudden disappointment, which he now blushed to recollect.  It seemed to him as if some magician must have laid a spell upon his eyes, that he did not see even in that darkness how lovely a face Mercy had, did not feel even through all the embarrassment and strangeness the fascination of her personal presence.  Then he dwelt lingeringly on the picture, which had never faded from his brain, of his next sight of her, as she sat on the old stone wall, with the gay maple-leaves and blackberry-vines in her lap.  From that day to the present, he had seen her only a half dozen times, and only for a chance greeting as they had passed each other in the street; but it seemed to him that she had never been really absent from him, so conscious was he of her all the time.  So absorbed was he in these thoughts that a half-hour was gone before he realized it, and the village bells were ringing for nine o’ clock when he knocked on the door of the wing.