made of her old face peering out into the darkness there to-night! She
would have done for the witch of Endor, watching to see if Samuel were
coming up." And as he went down more slowly, revolving in his mind what
plausible excuse he could give to his mother for his tardiness, he
thought, "Well, I do hope she'll be at least tolerably good-looking."

Already the younger of the two women who were coming to live under his
roof was "she," in his thoughts.




Chapter II.



In the mean time, the young widow, Mercy Philbrick, and her old and almost
childish mother, Mercy Carr, were coming by slow and tiring stage journeys
up the dreary length of Cape Cod. For thirty years the elder woman had
never gone out of sight of the village graveyard in which her husband and
four children were buried. To transplant her was like transplanting an old
weather-beaten tree, already dead at the top. Yet the physicians had said
that the only chance of prolonging her life was to take her away from the
fierce winds of the sea. She herself, while she loved them, shrank from
them. They seemed to pierce her lungs like arrows of ice-cold steel, at
once wounding and benumbing. Yet the habit and love of the seashore life
were so strong upon her that she would never have been able to tear
herself away from her old home, had it not been for her daughter's
determined will. Mercy Philbrick was a woman of slight frame, gentle,
laughing, brown eyes, a pale skin, pale ash-brown hair, a small nose; a