A tall young man stood on the doorsteps of the meeting-house, as Dorcas went demurely behind her parents in at the open door.  He looked at her with a quick, inquiring glance from his keen Yankee eyes, which she answered with an almost imperceptible nod of her graceful head.  She dropped her eyes, and passed on.  This young man was Henry Mowers, and he owned the Mowers farm.  He was a very good, sensible fellow, and had “kept company,” as the country-phrase is, with Dorcas Fox for the last few weeks, having, indeed, had his eye on her ever since the New-Year’s sleigh-ride and ball.

After Dorcas had reached her seat in the pew, and adjusted her spotless Sunday chintz and the ribbon that confined her jaunty gypsy-hat over her sunny hair, she raised her eyes carelessly to a pew in a side-aisle.  The Dorrs generally occupied it alone; but sometimes Swan Day, when he wasn’t in the choir, sat there too.

Swan Day, or, as he might better have been called, Night Raven, kept the country-store in Walton.  One naturally thought of afternoon rather than morning at seeing his olive complexion, dark eyes, and thick-clustering black curls.  Such romance as was to be had in Walton, without the aid of a circulating library, certainly gathered about Swan Day.  An orphan, born of a Creole mother and a British sergeant, he had been left early to his own resources.  He had found them sufficient thus far, in a cordial neighborhood like Walton, when industry and temperance were cardinal virtues not carried to excess; and he was rather a favorite among the young women.

The peculiar languor and richness of his complexion,—­the dark eyes, soft as an Indian girl’s,—­the mouth, melting and red as the grapes where under a tropical sun his foreign mother had lain, and, gathering them ripe, had dropped them lazily into his baby mouth:  these were new and strange features in the Saxon community where he had accidentally been left on the death of his father, who was shot at Saratoga.  The mother lingered awhile, and then dropped away, leaving Swan to thrive in the bracing air in which she had shivered to death.

Many Sundays before this, Swan had looked at Colonel Fox’s pew, and, looking, loved.

Dorcas looked occasionally.

All the time, while the minister preached, she twiddled her caraway-stems, sometimes biting a seed in two very softly between her little teeth, and keeping, on the whole, an appearance of exemplary devoutness.  When Father Boardman reached “sixthly,” she raised her eyes, and saw Henry Mowers looking straight at her.  Then she dropped her eyelids at once, sniffed delicately at her bouquet of southernwood, and, gaining strength from its pungency, applied herself to staring once more at the great pine pulpit, where, like a very old sparrow on the house-top, Father Boardman denounced and anathematized at leisure all who did not think as he did.  By degrees, all the eyes in Dorcas’s neighborhood that had been any length