Thomas Merriam heard this last with a satisfaction which he did not try to disguise from himself, because he never dreamed of there being any selfish element in it.  It was all for Evelina.  Many a time he had looked about the humble house where he had been born, and where he would have to take Evelina after he had married her, and striven to see its poor features with her eyes—­not with his, for which familiarity had tempered them.  Often, as he sat with his parents in the old sitting-room, in which he had kept so far an unquestioning belief, as in a friend of his childhood, the scales of his own personality would fall suddenly from his eyes.  Then he would see, as Evelina, the poor, worn, humble face of his home, and his heart would sink.  “I don’t see how I ever can bring her here,” he thought.  He began to save, a few cents at a time, out of his pitiful salary, to at least beautify his own chamber a little when Evelina should come.  He made up his mind that she should have a little dressing-table, with an oval mirror, and a white muslin frill around it, like one he had seen in Boston.  “She shall have that to sit before while she combs her hair,” he thought, with defiant tenderness, when he stowed away another shilling in a little box in his trunk.  It was money which he ordinarily bestowed upon foreign missions; but his Evelina had come between him and the heathen.  To procure some dainty furnishings for her bridal-chamber he took away a good half of his tithes for the spread of the gospel in the dark lands.  Now and then his conscience smote him, he felt shamefaced before his deacons, but Evelina kept her first claim.  He resolved that another year he would hire a piece of land, and combine farming with his ministerial work, and so try to eke out his salary, and get a little more money to beautify his poor home for his bride.

Now if Evelina Adams had come to the appointed time for the closing of her solitary life, and if her young cousin should inherit a share of her goodly property and the fine old mansion-house, all necessity for anxiety of this kind was over.  Young Evelina would not need to be taken away, for the sake of her love, from all these comforts and luxuries.  Thomas Merriam rejoiced innocently, without a thought for himself.

In the course of the winter he confided in his father; he couldn’t keep it to himself any longer.  Then there was another reason.  Seeing Evelina so little made him at times almost doubt the reality of it all.  There were days when he was depressed, and inclined to ask himself if he had not dreamed it.  Telling somebody gave it substance.

His father listened soberly when he told him; he had grown old of late.

“Well,” said he, “she ’ain’t been used to living the way you have, though you have had advantages that none of your folks ever had; but if she likes you, that’s all there is to it, I s’pose.”

The old man sighed wearily.  He sat in his arm-chair at the kitchen fireplace; his wife had gone in to one of the neighbors, and the two were alone.