usual cheery, ringing tones, as she assisted her mother down the clumsy
steps from the old-fashioned, high vehicle. "They're expecting us: it is
all right." But her voice and face belied her words. She moved all
through the rest of the evening like one in a dream. She said little, but
busied herself in making her mother as comfortable as it was possible to
be in the dingy and unattractive little rooms; and, as soon as the tired
old woman had fallen asleep, Mercy sat down on the floor by the window,
and leaning her head on the sill cried hard.




Chapter III.



The next morning the sun shone, and Mercy was herself again. Her
depression of the evening before seemed to her so causeless, so
inexplicable, that she recalled it almost with terror, as one might a
temporary insanity. She blushed to think of her unreasonable sensitiveness
to the words and tones of Stephen White. "As if it made any sort of
difference to mother and to me whether he were our friend or not. He can
do as he likes. I hope I'll be out when he calls," thought Mercy, as she
stood on the hotel piazza, after breakfast, scanning with a keen and eager
glance every feature of the scene. To her eyes, accustomed to the broad,
open, leisurely streets of the Cape Cod hamlet, its isolated little houses
with their trim flower-beds in front and their punctiliously kept fences
and gates, this somewhat untidy and huddled town looked unattractive. The
hotel stood on the top of one of the plateaus of which I spoke in the last
chapter. The ground fell away slowly to the east and to the south. A