would hardly have known them. The days went by,
to them all, as days go by for children: unnamed, uncounted; only marked
by joy of sleep, and the delight of waking. In after years, when Hetty
looked back upon these weeks, they seemed to her, not like a dream,
which is usually the heart's first choice of a phrase to describe the
swift flight of a happy time, but like a few days spent on some other
planet, where, for the interval, she had been changed into a sort of
supernatural child. Except at night, they were never in the house. The
harsh New England May laid aside for them all its treacheries, and was
indeed the month of spring. Their mornings they spent on the water,
rowing or sailing; their afternoons in driving through the budding and
blossoming country. Always the baby lay in Hetty's lap: from the
beginning, his nurse had found herself perpetually set aside by Hetty's
imperious affection. As Eben Williams looked, day after day, on the
picture which Hetty and the baby made, he found himself day after day
more and more bewildered by Hetty. She had adopted towards him a uniform
manner of cordial familiarity, which had in it, however, no shade of
intimacy. If Hetty had been the veriest coquette living, she could not
have devised a more effectual charm to a man of Eben Williams's
temperament. He had come out unscathed from many sieges which had been
laid to him by women. He knew very well the ordinary methods, the
atmosphere of the average wooing or wooable woman, and he was proof
against them all. He was thirty years old and he had never yet been in
love. But this woman, who treated him with the same easy, unconscious
frankness with which men treat men, who never seemed to observe his
going or his coming, otherwise than as it might affect her friend's need
of him as a physician; this woman who seemed all mother while she was
holding the baby, and all boy while she was trying, under old Captain
Mayhew's guidance to learn to sail a boat; this woman who was a spinster
in years, and a child in simplicity and directness; who was beautiful,
and never once thought of her beauty; who was alone, and never seemed
lonely: she was a perpetual problem and fascination to him. Dr. Eben was
not usually given to concerning himself much as to other people's
opinion of him: but he found himself for ever wondering what Hetty Gunn
thought of him; whether she were beginning to lose any of her old
prejudice against him; and whether, after thi