This was the picture that Stephen White saw, as he came slowly up the road
on his way home after an unusually wearying day. He slackened his pace,
and, perceiving how entirely unconscious Mercy was of his approach,
deliberately studied her, feature, dress, attitude,--all, as
scrutinizingly as if she had been painted on canvas and hanging on a wall.

"Upon my word," he said to himself, "she isn't bad-looking, after all. I'm
not sure that she isn't pretty. If she hadn't that inconceivable bonnet on
her head,--yes, she is very pretty. Her mouth is bewitching. I declare, I
believe she is beautiful," were Stephen's successive verdicts, as he drew
nearer and nearer to Mercy. Mercy was thinking of him at that very
moment,--was thinking of him with a return of the annoyance and
mortification which had stung her at intervals all day, whenever she
recalled their interview of the previous evening. Mercy combined, in a
very singular manner, some of the traits of an impulsive nature with those
of an unimpulsive one. She did things, said things, and felt things with
the instantaneous intensity of the poetic temperament; but she was quite
capable of looking at them afterward, and weighing them with the cool and
unbiassed judgment of the most phlegmatic realist. Hence she often had
most uncomfortable seasons, in which one side of her nature took the other
side to task, scorned it and berated it severely; holding up its actions
to its remorseful view, as an elder sister might chide a younger one, who
was incorrigibly perverse and wayward.

"It was about as silly a thing as you ever did in your life. He must have
thought you a perfect fool to have supposed he had come down to meet you,"
she was saying to herself at the very moment when the sound of Stephen's
footsteps first reached her ear, and caused her to look up. The sight of
his face at that particular moment was so startling and so unpleasant to