years; but if Rowland's youthful consciousness was not chilled by the
menace of long punishment for brief transgression, he had at least been
made to feel that there ran through all things a strain of right and of
wrong, as different, after all, in their complexions, as the texture, to
the spiritual sense, of Sundays and week-days. His father was a chip of
the primal Puritan block, a man with an icy smile and a stony frown. He
had always bestowed on his son, on principle, more frowns than smiles,
and if the lad had not been turned to stone himself, it was because
nature had blessed him, inwardly, with a well of vivifying waters. Mrs.
Mallet had been a Miss Rowland, the daughter of a retired sea-captain,
once famous on the ships that sailed from Salem and Newburyport. He
had brought to port many a cargo which crowned the edifice of fortunes
already almost colossal, but he had also done a little sagacious trading
on his own account, and he was able to retire, prematurely for so
sea-worthy a maritime organism, upon a pension of his own providing. He
was to be seen for a year on the Salem wharves, smoking the best tobacco
and eying the seaward horizon with an inveteracy which superficial
minds interpreted as a sign of repentance. At last, one evening, he
disappeared beneath it, as he had often done before; this time,
however, not as a commissioned navigator, but simply as an amateur of an
observing turn likely to prove oppressive to the officer in command of
the vessel. Five months later his place at home knew him again, and made
the acquaintance also of a handsome, blonde young woman, of redundant
contours, speaking a foreign tongue. The foreign tongue proved, after
much conflicting research, to be the idiom of Amsterdam, and the young
woman, which was stranger still, to be Captain Rowland's wife. Why
he had gone forth so suddenly across the seas to marry her, what had
happened between them before, and whether--though it was of questionable
propriety for a good citizen to espouse a young person of mysterious
origin, who did her hair in fantastically elaborate plaits, and in whose