g the
peach preserve. She and her brother were both quite well-to-do, but
she had a parsimonious turn.

"I'd like to know what she'll have for supper," she remarked further.

"I didn't ask her," said the lawyer, dryly, taking a sip of his
sauce. He was rather glad of the peach himself.

"I shouldn't think she'd sleep a wink, all alone in that great old
house. I know I shouldn't," observed the children's mother. She was a
fair, fleshy, quite pretty young woman.

"That woman would sleep on a tomb-stone if she set out to," said the
lawyer. His speech, when alone with his own household, was more
forcible and not so well regulated. Indeed, he did not come of a
polished family; he was the only educated one among them. His sister,
Mrs. Low, regarded him with all the deference and respect which her
own decided and self-sufficient character could admit of, and often
sounded his praises in her unrestrained New England dialect.

"She seemed like a real set kind of a woman, then?" said she now.

"Set is no name for it," replied her brother.

"Well, if that's so, I guess old Mr. Maxwell wa'n't so far wrong when
he didn't have her down here before," she remarked, with a judicial
air. Her spectacles glittered, and her harsh, florid face bent
severely over the sugar-bowl and the cups and saucers.

The lamp-light was mellow in the neat, homely dining-room, and there
was a soft aroma of boiling tea all about. The pink and white
children ate their peach sauce in happy silence, with their pretty
eyes upon the prospective cake.

"I suppose there must be some bed made up in all that big house,"
remarked their mother; "but it must be awful lonesome."

Of the awful lonesomeness of it truly, this smiling, comfortable
young soul had no conception. At that moment, while they were
drinking their tea and talking her over, Jane Field sat bolt-upright
in one of the old flag-bottomed chairs in the Maxwell sitting-room.
She had dropped into it when the lawyer closed the door after him,
and she never stirred afterward. She sat there all night.

The oil was low in the lamp which the lawyer had lighted, and left
standing on the table between the windows. She could see distinctly
for a while the stately pieces of old furniture standing in their
places against the walls. Just opposite where she sat was one of
lustreless old mahogany, extending the width of the wall between two
doors, rearing itself upon slender legs, set with multitudinous
dra