When there was a report that Mr. Savory Gray was coming to Delafield to establish a school for boys, Dr. Peewee, the minister of the village, called to communicate the news to Mr. Christopher Burt, his oldest and richest parishioner, at Pine wood, his country seat.  When Mr. Burt heard the news, he foresaw trouble without end; for his orphan grand-daughter, Hope Wayne, who lived with him, was nearly eighteen years old; and it had been his fixed resolution that she should be protected from the wicked world of youth that is always going up and down in the earth seeking whom it may marry.  If incessant care, and invention, and management could secure it, she should arrive safely where Grandpa Burt was determined she should arrive ultimately, at the head of her husband’s dinner-table, Mrs. Simcoe, ma’am.

Mrs. Simcoe was Mr. Burt’s housekeeper.  So far as any body could say, Mrs. Burt died at a period of which the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.  There were traditions of other housekeepers.  But since the death of Hope’s mother Mrs. Simcoe was the only incumbent.  She had been Mrs. Wayne’s nurse in her last moments, and had rocked the little Hope to sleep the night after her mother’s burial.  She was always tidy, erect, imperturbable.  She pervaded the house; and her eye was upon a table-cloth, a pane of glass, or a carpet, almost as soon as the spot which arrested it.  Housekeeper nascitur non fit.  She was so silent and shadowy that the whole house sympathized with her, until it became extremely uncomfortable to the servants, who constantly went away; and a story that the house was haunted became immensely popular and credible the moment it was told.

There had been no visiting at Pinewood for a long time, because of the want of a mistress and of the unsocial habits of Mr. Burt.  But the neighboring ladies were just beginning to call upon Miss Wayne.  When she returned the visits Mrs. Simcoe accompanied her in the carriage, and sat there while Miss Wayne performed the parlor ceremony.  Then they drove home.  Mr. Burt dined at two, and Miss Hope sat opposite her grandfather at table; Hiram waited.  Mrs. Simcoe dined alone in her room.

There, too, she sat alone in the long summer afternoons, when the work of the house was over for the day.  She held a book by the open window, or gazed for a very long time out upon the landscape.  There were pine-trees near her window; but beyond she could see green meadows, and blue hills, and a glittering river, and rounded reaches of woods.  She watched the clouds, or, at least, looked at the sky.  She heard the birds in spring days, and the dry hot locusts on sultry afternoons; and she looked with the same unchanging eyes upon the opening buds and blooming flowers, as upon the worms that swung themselves on filaments and ate the leaves and ruined the trees, or the autumnal hectic which Death painted upon the leaves that escaped the worms.