should, for all of Ad, but when the pale, gentle-looking woman, knitting
so quietly in her accustomed chair, looked up and said imploringly:

"Please turn them into the kitchen, they'll surely be comfortable
there," he yielded at once, for that pale, gentle woman, was his mother,
and, to her wishes, Hugh was generally obedient.

The room was cleared of all its canine occupants, save Kelpie, who Hugh
insisted should remain, the mother resumed her knitting, and Adaline her
book, while Hugh sat down before the blazing fire, and, with his hands
crossed above his head, went on into a reverie, the nature of which his
mother, who was watching him, could not guess; and when at last she
asked of what he was thinking so intently, he made her no reply. He
could hardly have told himself, so varied were the thoughts crowding
upon his brain that wintry night. Now they were of the eccentric old
man, who had been to him a father, and from whom he had received Spring
Bank, together with the many peculiar ideas which made him the strange,
odd creature he was, a puzzle and a mystery to his own sex, and a kind
of terror to the female portion of the neighborhood, who looked upon him
as a woman-hater, and avoided or coveted his not altogether disagreeable
society, just as their fancy dictated. For years the old man and the boy
had lived together alone in that great, lonely house, enjoying vastly
the freedom from all restraint, the liberty of turning the parlors into
kennels if they chose, and converting the upper rooms into a hay-loft,
if they would. No white woman was ever seen upon the premises, unless
she came as a beggar, when some new gown, or surplice, or organ, or
chandelier, was needed for the pretty little church, lifting its modest
spire so unobtrusively among the forest trees, not very far from Spring
Bank. John Stanley didn't believe in churches; nor gowns, nor organs,
nor women, but he was proverbially liberal, and so the fair ones of