I had leisure to observe the apartment—­the neatly-scrubbed floor, with one narrow cot bed against the wall, a tall bureau on which some brown old books were lying, and the little dust-pan and dust-brush on a brass nail in the corner.  There was a brightly polished stove with no fire in it, and some straight-backed chairs of yellow wood stood round the room.  An open door into a large, roomy closet showed various garments of men’s apparel hanging upon the wall.  The plain thermometer in the window casement seemed the one article of luxury or ornament in the apartment.  I believe I made my observations on all these things aloud, concluding with, “Oh, Bessie!  Bessie! you shall not stay here.”  I know that I was startled enough by the apparition of a man standing in the open closet door.  He must have been within it at my entrance, and had heard all I said.

He came forward, holding out his hand—­very friendly apparently.  Then, requesting me to be seated, he drew out a chair from the wall and sat down, tilting it back on two legs and leaning against the wall, with his hands folded before him.  Some commonplace remark about the weather, which I answered, led to a rambling conversation, in which he expressed the greatest curiosity as to worldly matters, and asked several purely local questions about the city of New York.  Perhaps his ignorance was feigned.  I do not know, but I found myself relating, a la Stanley-Livingstone, some of the current events of the day.  His face was quite intelligent, tanned with labor in the fields, and his brown eyes were kind and soft, like those of some dumb animals.  I note his eyes here especially, as different in expression from those of others of his sect.

Several times during the conversation I heard footsteps in the hall, and darted from my seat, and finally, in my impatience, began to pace the floor.  Kindly as he looked, I did not wish to question the man about Bessie.  I would rely upon the beaming portress, whose “Sure” was such an earnest of her good-will.  Moreover, a feeling of contempt, growing out of pity, was taking possession of me.  This man, in what did he differ from the Catholic priest save in the utter selfishness of his creed?  Beside the sordid accumulation of gain to which his life was devoted the priest’s mission among crowded alleys and fever-stricken lanes seemed luminous and grand.  A moral suicide, with no redeeming feature.  The barns bursting with fatness, the comfortable houses, gain added to gain—­to what end?  I was beginning to give very short answers indeed to his questions, and was already meditating a foray through the rest of the house, when the door opened slowly and a lady-abbess entered.  She was stiff and stately, with the most formal neckerchief folded precisely over her straitened bust, a clear-muslin cap concealing her hair, and her face, stony, blue-eyed and cold—­a pale, frozen woman standing stately there.

“Bessie Stewart?” said I.  “She is here—­I know it.  Do not detain her.  I must see her.  Why all this delay?”