“There is no reason why we should lose our interest, for the sake of keeping her along.”

“The mortgage was for too large a sum.  I doubt if the old house could sell to-day for enough to clear it, anyhow.”  These were some of the suggestions which the devil kept whispering into Stephen’s ear, in these long hours of perplexity and misgiving.  It was a question of casuistry which might, perhaps, have puzzled a finer moral sense than Stephen’s.  Why should he treat old Mrs. Jacobs with any more consideration than he would show to a man under the same circumstances?  To be sure, she was a helpless old woman; but so was his own mother, and surely his first duty was to make her as comfortable as possible.

Luckily for old Mrs. Jacobs, a tenant appeared for the “south wing.”  A friend of Stephen’s, a young clergyman living in a seaport town on Cape Cod, had written to him, asking about the house, which he knew Stephen was anxious to rent.  He made these inquiries on behalf of two women, parishioners of his, who were obliged to move to some inland town on account of the elder woman’s failing health.  They were mother and daughter, but both widows.  The younger woman’s marriage had been a tragically sad one, her husband having died suddenly, only a few days after their marriage.  She had returned at once to her mother’s house, widowed at eighteen; “heart-broken,” the young clergyman wrote, “but the most cheerful person in this town,—­the most cheerful person I ever knew; her smile is the sunniest and most pathetic thing I ever saw.”

Stephen welcomed most gladly the prospect of such tenants as these.  The negotiations were soon concluded; and at the time of the beginning of our story the two women were daily expected.

A strange feverishness of desire to have them arrive possessed Stephen’s mind.  He longed for it, and yet he dreaded it.  He liked the stillness of the house; he felt a sense of ownership of the whole of it:  both of these satisfactions were to be interfered with now.  But he had a singular consciousness that some new element was coming into his life.  He did not define this; he hardly recognized it in its full extent; but if a bystander could have looked into his mind, following the course of his reverie distinctly, as an unbiassed outsider might, he would have said, “Stephen, man, what is this?  What are these two women to you, that your imagination is taking these wild and superfluous leaps into their history?”

There was hardly a possible speculation as to their past history, as to their looks, as to their future life under his roof, that Stephen did not indulge in, as he stood leaning with his folded arms on the gate, in the gray November twilight, where we first found him.  His thoughts, as was natural, centred most around the younger woman.

“Poor thing!  That was a mighty hard fate.  Only nineteen years old now,—­six years younger than I am; and how much more she must know of life than I do.  I suppose she can’t be a lady, exactly,—­being a sea captain’s wife.  I wonder if she’s pretty?  I think Harley might have told me more about her.  He might know I’d be very curious.