her routine. A five minutes' delay was to her a serious annoyance, and
demanded an accurate explanation. Stephen so thoroughly understood this
exactingness on her part that he adjusted his life to it, as a
conscientious school-boy adjusts his to bells and signals, and never
trespassed knowingly. If he had dreamed that it was past tea-time, on this
unlucky night, he would never have thought of asking Mercy to go in and
see his mother. But he did not; and it was with a bright and eager face
that he threw open the door, and said in the most cordial tone,--

"Mother, I have brought Mrs. Philbrick to see you."

"How do you do, Mrs. Philbrick?" was the rejoinder, in a tone and with a
look so chilling that poor Mercy's heart sank within her. She had all
along had an ideal in her own mind of the invalid old lady, Mr. White's
mother, to whom she was to be very good, and who was to be her mother's
companion. She pictured her as her own mother would be, a good deal older
and feebler, in a gentle, receptive, patient old age. Of so repellent,
aggressive, unlovely an old woman as this she had had no conception. It
would be hard to do justice in words to Mrs. White's capacity to be
disagreeable when she chose. She had gray eyes, which, though they had a
very deceptive trick of suffusing with tears as of great sensibility on
occasion, were capable of resting upon a person with a positively unhuman
coldness; her voice also had at these times a distinctly unhuman quality
in its tones. She had apparently no conception of any necessity of
controlling her feelings, or the expression of them. If she were pleased,
if all things went precisely as she liked, if all persons ministered to
her pleasure, well and good,--she would be graciously pleased to smile,
and be good-humored. If she were displeased, if her preferences were not
consulted, if her plans were interfered with, woe betide the first person
who entered her presence; and still more woe betide the person who was