Chapter I.

It was late in the afternoon of a November day. The sky had worn all daythat pale leaden gray color, which is depressing even to the leastsensitive of souls. Now, at sunset, a dull red tint was slowly stealingover the west; but the gray cloud was too thick for the sun to pierce, andthe struggle of the crimson color with the unyielding sky only made theheavens look more stern and pitiless than before.

Stephen White stood with his arms folded, leaning on the gate which shutoff, but seemed in no wise to separate, the front yard of the house inwhich he lived from the public highway. There is something always patheticin the attempt to enforce the idea of seclusion and privacy, by building afence around houses only ten or twelve feet away from the public road, andonly forty or fifty feet from each other. Rows of picketed palings andgates with latches and locks seem superfluous, when the passer-by canlook, if he likes, into the very centre of your sitting-room, and yourneighbors on the right hand and on the left can overhear every word yousay on a summer night, where windows are open.

One cannot walk through the streets of a New England village, withoutbeing impressed by a sense of this futile semblance of barrier, thistouching effort at withdrawal and reticence. Often we see the tacitrecognition of its uselessness in an old gate shoved back to its farthest,and left standing so till the very grass roots have embanked themselves oneach side of it, and it can never again be closed without digging away thesods in which it is wedged. The gate on which Stephen White was leaninghad stood open in that way for years before Stephen rented the house; hadstood open, in fact, ever since old Billy Jacobs, the owner of the house,had been carried out of it dead, in a coffin so wide that at first thebearers had thought it could not pass through the gate; but by huddlingclose, three at the head and three at the feet, they managed to tug theheavy old man through without taking down the palings. This was so longago that now there was nobody left who remembered Billy Jacobs distinctly,except his widow, who lived in a poor little house on the outskirts of thetown, her only income being that derived from the renting of the largehouse, in which she had once lived in comfort with her husband and son.The house was a double house; and for a few years Billy Jacobs's twinbrother, a sea captain, had lived in the other half of it. But Mrs. Billycould not abide Mrs. John, and so with a big heart wrench the two