THE WIDOW AND HER DAUGHTER.

Mrs. Belding’s house was next to that of Mr. Farnham, and the neighborly custom of Algonquin Avenue was to build no middle walls of partition between adjoining lawns.  A minute’s walk, therefore, brought the young man to the door of Mrs. Belding’s cottage.  She called it a cottage, and so we have no excuse for calling it anything else, though it was a big three-storied house, built of the soft creamy stone of the Buffland quarries, and it owed its modest name to an impression in the lady’s mind that gothic gables and dormer windows were a necessary adjunct of cottages.  She was a happy woman, though she would have been greatly surprised to hear herself so described.  She had not been out of mourning since she was a young girl.  Her parents, as she sometimes said, “had put her into black”; and several children had died in infancy, one after the other, until at last her husband, Jairus Belding, the famous bridge-builder, had perished of a malarial fever caught in the swamps of the Wabash, and left her with one daughter and a large tin box full of good securities.  She never afterward altered the style of her dress, and she took much comfort in feeling free from all further allegiance to milliners.  In fact, she had a nature which was predisposed to comfort.  She had been fond of her husband, but she had been a little afraid of him, and, when she had wept her grief into tranquillity, she felt a certain satisfaction in finding herself the absolute mistress of her income and her bedroom.  Her wealth made her the object of matrimonial ambition once or twice, and she had sufficient beauty to flatter herself that she was loved more for her eyes than her money; but she refused her suitors with an indolent good-nature that did not trouble itself with inquiries as to their sincerity.  “I have been married once, thank you, and that is enough”; this she said simply without sighing or tears.  Perhaps the unlucky aspirant might infer that her heart was buried in the grave of Jairus.  But the sober fact was that she liked her breakfast at her own hours.  Attached to the spacious sleeping-room occupied in joint tenancy by herself and the bridge-builder were two capacious closets.  After the funeral of Mr. Belding, she took possession of both of them, hanging her winter wardrobe in one and her summer raiment in the other, and she had never met a man so fascinating as to tempt her to give up to him one of these rooms.

She was by no means a fool.  Like many easy-going women, she had an enlightened selfishness which prompted her to take excellent care of her affairs.  As long as old Mr. Farnham lived, she took his advice implicitly in regard to her investments, and after his death she transferred the same unquestioning confidence to his grandson and heir, although he was much younger than herself and comparatively inexperienced in money matters.  It seemed to her only natural that some of the Farnham wisdom should have descended with the