nock at the door in the evening makes us all jump. Pray
come in," and she threw open the door into the sitting-room, where the
lamps had already been put out, and the light of a blazing hickory log
made long flickering shadows on the crimson carpet. In this dancing light,
the room looked still more like a grove than it had to Marty at high noon.
Stephen's eyes fastened hungrily on the sight.

"Your room is almost too much to resist," he said; "but I will not come in
now. I did not know it was so late. My mother wishes to know if you and
your mother will not come in and eat a Christmas dinner with us to-morrow.
We live in the plainest way, and cannot entertain in the ordinary
acceptation of the term. We only ask you to our ordinary home-dinner," he
added, with a sudden sense of the incongruity between the atmosphere of
refined elegance which pervaded Mercy's simple, little room, and the
expression which all his efforts had never been able to banish from his
mother's parlor.

"Oh thank you, Mr. White. You are very good. I think we should like to
come very much. Mother and I were just saying that it would be the first
Christmas dinner we ever ate alone. But you must come in, Mr. White,--I
insist upon it," replied Mercy, stretching out one hand towards him, as if
to draw him in.

Stephen went. On the threshold of the sitting-room he paused and stood
silent for some minutes. Mercy was relighting the lamps.

"Oh, Mrs. Philbrick!" he exclaimed, "won't you please not light the lamps.
This firelight on these evergreens is the loveliest thing I ever saw."

Too unconventional to think of any reasons why she should not sit with
Stephen White alone by firelight in her own house, Mercy blew out the lamp
she had lighted, and drawing a chair close up to the hearth sat down, and
clasping her hands in her lap looked eagerly into Stephen's face, and said
as simply as a child,--

"I like firelight, too, a great deal better than any other light. Some
evenings we do not light the lamps at all. Mother can knit just as well
without much light, and I can think better."

Mercy was sitting in a chair so low that, to look at Stephen, she had to
lift her face. It was the position in which her face was sweetest. Some
lines, which were a shade too strong and positive when her face fully
confronted you, disappeared entirely when it was thrown back and her eyes
were lifted. It was then as ingenuous and tender and trustful a face as if
she had be