And so there was a dead silence, except when the rain and sleet lashed
the window-panes, or a lump of coal crumbled into a thousand glowing
fragments, and opened a glowing abyss in the grate; or the cat uncurled
herself on the rug, and purred, while she fixed her great winking eyes
on the blaze. The two persons who occupied the room were an old man
and a young maiden. He was stern, and sour-looking, as he sat in his
high-back leather chair, with a pile of ledgers on the table before
him,--the pages of which he examined with the most incomparable
patience. A snuff-colored wig sat awry on his head, and a
snuff-colored coat, ornamented with large horn buttons, drooped
ungracefully from his high, stooping shoulders. His neckcloth was
white, but twisted, soiled, and tied carelessly around his thin, sinewy
throat. His legs were cased in gray lamb's-wool stockings, over which
his small-clothes were fastened at the knees with small silver buckles.
His face was not originally cast in such a repulsive mould, but
commerce with the world, and a succession of stinging disappointments
in his early manhood, had woven an ugly mask over it, from behind which
glimpses of his former self, on rare occasions, shone out. Such was
Mark Stillinghast at the opening of our story: old, cynical, and rich,
but poor in friendship, and without any definite ideas of religion,
except, that if such a thing really existed, it was a _terra
incognita_, towards which men rather stumbled than ran.

Opposite to him, on a low crimson chair, as antique in its pattern as
the owner of the mansion, sat a maiden, who might have passed her
seventeenth summer. She was not beautiful, and yet her face had a
peculiar charm, which appealed directly to the softer and kindlier
emotions of the heart. Her eyes, large, gray and beautifully fringed
with long, black lashes, reminded one of calm mountain lakes, into