He walked up and down in the snowy path in front of the house for some minutes, questioning himself, sounding with a delicious dread the depths of this strange sea in which he suddenly found himself drifting.

He went back to the day when Harley Allen's letter first told him of the two women who might become his tenants.

He felt then a presentiment that a new element was to be introduced into his life; a vague, prophetic sense of some change at hand.
Then came the first interview, and his sudden disappointment, which he now blushed to recollect.

It seemed to him as if some magician must have laid a spell upon his eyes, that he did not see even in that darkness how lovely a face Mercy had, did not feel even through all the embarrassment and strangeness the fascination of her personal presence.

Then he dwelt lingeringly on the picture, which had never faded from his brain, of his next sight of her, as she sat on the old stone wall, with the gay maple-leaves and blackberry-vines in her lap.