Squire's pew. Nobody had seen her come to town, and nobody knew who
she was or where she came from, but the old people said she looked
just as Evelina Adams used to when she was young, and she must be
some relation. The old man who had used to look across the
meeting-house at Evelina, over forty years ago, looked across now at
this young girl, and gave a great start, and his face paled under his
gray beard stubble. His old wife gave an anxious, wondering glance at
him, and crammed a peppermint into his hand. "Anything the matter,
father?" she whispered; but he only gave his head a half-surly shake,
and then fastened his eyes straight ahead upon the pulpit. He had
reason to that day, for his only son, Thomas, was going to preach his
first sermon therein as a candidate. His wife ascribed his
nervousness to that. She put a peppermint in her own mouth and sucked
it comfortably. "That's all 't is," she thought to herself. "Father
always was easy worked up," and she looked proudly up at her son
sitting on the hair-cloth sofa in the pulpit, leaning his handsome
young head on his hand, as he had seen old divines do. She never
dreamed that her old husband sitting beside her was possessed of an
inner life so strange to her that she would not have known him had
she met him in the spirit. And, indeed, it had been so always, and
she had never dreamed of it. Although he had been faithful to his
wife, the image of Evelina Adams in her youth, and that one love-look
which she had given him, had never left his soul, but had given it a
guise and complexion of which his nearest and dearest knew nothing.

It was strange, but now, as he looked up at his own son as he arose
in the pulpit, he could seem to see a look of that fair young
Evelina, who had never had a son to inherit her beauty. He had
certainly a delicate brilliancy of complexion, which he could have
gotten directly from neither father nor mother; and whence came that