Aunt Blin,—­dear old simple, kindly-hearted Aunt Blin, who believed cats and birds,—­her cat and bird, at least,—­might be thrown trustfully into each other’s company, if only she impressed it sufficiently upon the quadruped’s mind from the beginning, that the bird was “very, very precious,”—­thought Mr. Hewland was “such a nice young man.”

And so he was.  A nice, genial, well-meaning, well-bred gentleman; above anything ignoble, or consciously culpable, or common.  His danger lay in his higher tendencies.  He had artistic tastes; he was a lover of all grace and natural sweetness; no line of beauty could escape him.  More than that, he drew toward all that was most genuine; he cared nothing for the elegant artificialities among which his social position placed him.  He had been singularly attracted by this little New Hampshire girl, fresh and pretty as a wild rose, and full of bright, quaint ways and speech, of which he had caught glimpses and fragments in their near neighborhood.  Now and then, from her open window up to his had come her gay, sweet laugh; or her raised, gleeful tone, as she said some funny, quick, shrewd thing in her original fashion to her aunt.

Through the month of August, while work was slack, and the Hewland family was away travelling, and other lodgers’ rooms were vacated, the Brees had been more at home, and Morris Hewland had been more in his rooms above, than had been usual at most times.  The music mistress had taken a vacation, and gone into the country; only old Mr. Sparrow, lame with one weak ankle, hopped up and down; and the spare, odd-faced landlady glided about the passages with her prim profile always in the same pose, reminding one of a badly-made rag-doll, of which the nose, chin, and chest are in one invincible flat line, interrupted feebly by an unsuccessful hint of drawing in at the throat.

Mr. Hewland liked June for his travels; and July and August, when everybody was out of the way, for his quiet summer work.

The Hewlands called him odd, and let him go; he stayed at home sometimes, and he happened in and out, they knew where to find him, and there was “no harm in Morris but his artistic peculiarities.”

He had secured in these out-of-the way-lodgings in Leicester Place, one of the best north lights that could be had in the city; he would not take a room among a lot of others in a Studio Building.  So he worked up his studies, painted his pictures, let nobody come near him except as he chose to bring them, and when he wanted anything of the world, went out into the world and got it.

Now, something had come right in here close to him, which brought him a certain sense of such a world as he could not go out into at will, to get what he wanted.  A world of simplicities, of blessed contents, of unworn, joyous impulses, of little new, unceasing spontaneities; a world that he looked into, as we used to do at Sattler’s Cosmoramas, through the merest peepholes, and comprehended by the merest hints; but which the presence of this girl under the roof with himself as surely revealed to him as the wind-flower reveals the spring.