“Dear me,” thought Stephen, as he put it into the carriage at Mercy’s feet, “what sort of women are these I’ve taken under my roof!  I expect they’ll be very unpleasing sights to my eyes.  I did hope she’d be good-looking.”  How many times in after years did Stephen recall with laughter his first impressions of Mercy Philbrick, and wonder how he could have argued so unhesitatingly that a woman who travelled with only one small valise could not be good-looking.

“Will you come to the house to-morrow?” he asked.

“Oh, no,” replied Mercy, “not for three or four weeks yet.  Our furniture will not be here under that time.”

“Ah!” said Stephen, “I had not thought of that.  I will call on you at the hotel, then, in a day or two.”

His adieus were civil, but only civil:  that most depressing of all things to a sensitive nature, a kindly indifference, was manifest in every word he said, and in every tone of his voice.

Mercy felt it to the quick; but she was ashamed of herself for the feeling.  “What business had I to expect that he was going to be our friend?” she said in her heart.  “We are only tenants to him.”

“What a kind-spoken young man he is, to be sure, Mercy!” said Mrs. Carr.

So all-sufficient is bare kindliness of tone and speech to the unsensitive nature.

“Yes, mother, he was very kind,” said Mercy; “but I don’t think we shall ever know him very well.”

“Why, Mercy, why not?” exclaimed her mother.  “I should say he was most uncommon friendly for a stranger, running back after our valise in the rain, and a goin’ to call on you to oncet.”

Mercy made no reply.  The carriage rolled along over the rough and muddy road.  It was too dark to see any thing except the shadowy black shapes of houses, outlined on a still deeper blackness by the light streaming from their windows.  There is no sight in the world so hard for lonely, homeless people to see, as the sight of the lighted windows of houses after nightfall.  Why houses should look so much more homelike, so much more suggestive of shelter and cheer and companionship and love, when the curtains are snug-drawn and the doors shut, and nobody can look in, though the lights of fires and lamps shine out, than they do in broad daylight, with open windows and people coming and going through open doors, and a general air of comradeship and busy living, it is hard to see.  But there is not a lonely vagabond in the world who does not know that they do.  One may see on a dark night many a wistful face of lonely man or lonely woman, hurrying resolutely past, and looking away from, the illumined houses which mean nothing to them except the keen reminder of what they are without.  Oh, the homeless people there are in this world!  Did anybody ever think to count up the thousands there are in every great city, who live in lodgings and not in homes; from the luxurious lodger who lodges in the costliest rooms of the costliest hotel, down to the most poverty-stricken lodger who lodges in a corner of the poorest tenement-house?  Homeless all of them; their common vagabondage is only a matter of degrees of decency.  All honor to the bravery of those who are homeless because they must be, and who make the best of it.  But only scorn and pity for those who are homeless because they choose to be, and are foolish enough to like it.