tronger as his
temper was better. Persons judging hastily, by her violent assertions and
vehement statements of her determination, as contrasted with Stephen's
gentle, slow, almost hesitating utterance of his opinions or intentions,
might have assumed that she would always conquer; but it was not so. In
all little things, Stephen was her slave, because she was a suffering
invalid and his mother. But, in all important decisions, he was the
master; and she recognized it, and leaned upon it in a way which was
almost ludicrous in its alternation with her petulance and perpetual
dictating to him in trifles.

And so they went to live in the old Jacobs house. They took the northern
half of it, the part in which the sea captain and his wife had lived.
This half of the house was not so pleasant as the other, had less sun, and
had no door upon the street; but it was smaller and better suited to their
needs, and moreover, Stephen said to his mother,--

"We must live in the half we should find it hardest to rent to a desirable
tenant."

For the first six months after they moved in, the "wing," as Mrs. White
persisted in calling it, though it was larger by two rooms than the part
she occupied herself, stood empty. There would have been plenty of
applicants for it, but it had been noised in the town that the Whites had
given out that none but people as good as they were themselves would be
allowed to rent the house. This made a mighty stir among the mill
operatives and the trades-people, and Stephen got many a sour look and
short answer, whose real source he never suspected.

"Ahem! there he goes with his head in the clouds, damn him!" muttered
Barker the grocer, one day, as Stephen in a more than ordinarily
absent-minded fit had passed Mr. Barker's door without observing that Mr.
Barker stood in it, ready to bow and smile to the whole world. Mr.
Barker's sister had just married an overseer in the mill; and they had
been very anxious to set up housekeeping in the Jacobs house, but had been
prevented from applying for it by hearing of Mrs. White's determination to
have no mill people under the same roof with herself.

"Mill people, indeed!" exclaimed Jane Barker, when her lover told her, in
no very guarded terms, the reason they could not have the house on which
she had set her heart.

"Mill people, indeed! I'd like to know if they're not every whit's good's
an old shark of a lawyer like Hugh White was! I'll be bound, if poor ol