“I never saw such a woman,” was his conclusion of the story, which he related to his sister upon his return home.  His sister was a widow, and just then her married daughter and two children were visiting her.

“I wish you’d let me know she wa’n’t comin’,” said she.  “I cut the fruit cake an’ opened a jar of peach, an’ I’ve put clean sheets on the front chamber bed.  It’s made considerable work for nothin’.”  She eyed, as she spoke, the two children, who were happily eating 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.