Mrs. Carr had rolled up her knitting, and was just on the point of going upstairs.  Their little maid of all work had already gone to bed, when Stephen’s loud knock startled them all.

“Gracious alive!  Mercy, what’s that?” exclaimed Mrs. Carr, all sorts of formless terrors springing upon her at once.  Mercy herself was astonished, and ran hastily to open the door.  When she saw Stephen standing there, her astonishment was increased, and she looked it so undisguisedly that he said,—­

“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Philbrick.  I know it is late, but my mother sent me in with a message.” ...

“Pray come in, Mr. White,” interrupted Mercy.  “It is not really late, only we keep such absurdly early hours, and are so quiet, as we know nobody here, that a knock at the door in the evening makes us all jump.  Pray come in,” and she threw open the door into the sitting-room, where the lamps had already been put out, and the light of a blazing hickory log made long flickering shadows on the crimson carpet.  In this dancing light, the room looked still more like a grove than it had to Marty at high noon.  Stephen’s eyes fastened hungrily on the sight.

“Your room is almost too much to resist,” he said; “but I will not come in now.  I did not know it was so late.  My mother wishes to know if you and your mother will not come in and eat a Christmas dinner with us to-morrow.  We live in the plainest way, and cannot entertain in the ordinary acceptation of the term.  We only ask you to our ordinary home-dinner,” he added, with a sudden sense of the incongruity between the atmosphere of refined elegance which pervaded Mercy’s simple, little room, and the expression which all his efforts had never been able to banish from his mother’s parlor.

“Oh thank you, Mr. White.  You are very good.  I think we should like to come very much.  Mother and I were just saying that it would be the first Christmas dinner we ever ate alone.  But you must come in, Mr. White,—­I insist upon it,” replied Mercy, stretching out one hand towards him, as if to draw him in.

Stephen went.  On the threshold of the sitting-room he paused and stood silent for some minutes.  Mercy was relighting the lamps.

“Oh, Mrs. Philbrick!” he exclaimed, “won’t you please not light the lamps.  This firelight on these evergreens is the loveliest thing I ever saw.”

Too unconventional to think of any reasons why she should not sit with Stephen White alone by firelight in her own house, Mercy blew out the lamp she had lighted, and drawing a chair close up to the hearth sat down, and clasping her hands in her lap looked eagerly into Stephen’s face, and said as simply as a child,—­

“I like firelight, too, a great deal better than any other light.  Some evenings we do not light the lamps at all.  Mother can knit just as well without much light, and I can think better.”

Mercy was sitting in a chair so low that, to look at Stephen, she had to lift her face.  It was the position in which her face was sweetest.  Some lines, which were a shade too strong and positive when her face fully confronted you, disappeared entirely when it was thrown back and her eyes were lifted.  It was then as ingenuous and tender and trustful a face as if she had been but eight instead of eighteen.