the village
store, and Murad occasionally took a hand in some neighbor's hay-field,
or got a job of chopping wood in the winter. The mother was old and
small and withered, and they said evil-eyed. Probably she was no more
evil-eyed than any old woman who had such a hard struggle for existence
as she had. An old widow with an only son who looked like a Spaniard and
acted like an imp! Here was another sort of exotic in the New England
life.

Celia had been brought to Rivervale by her mother about a year before
this time, and the two occupied a neat little cottage in the village,
distinguished only by its neatness and a plot of syringas, and pinks,
and marigolds, and roses, and bachelor's-buttons, and boxes of the
tough little exotics, called "hen-and-chickens," in the door-yard, and
a vigorous fragrant honeysuckle over the front porch. She only dimly
remembered her father, who had been a merchant in a small way in
the city, and dying left to his widow and only child a very moderate
fortune. The girl showed early an active and ingenious mind, and an
equal love for books and for having her own way; but she was delicate,
and Mrs. Howard wisely judged that a few years in a country village
would improve her health and broaden her view of life beyond that of
cockney provincialism. For, though Mrs. Howard had more refinement
than strength of mind, and passed generally for a sweet and inoffensive
little woman, she did not lack a certain true perception of values, due
doubtless to the fact that she had been a New England girl, and, before
her marriage and emigration to the great city, had passed her life among
unexciting realities, and among people who had leisure to think out
things in a slow way. But the girl's energy and self-confidence had no
doubt been acquired from her father, who was cut off in mid-career of
his struggle for place in the metropolis, or from some remote ancestor.
Before she was eleven years old her mother had listened with some wonder
and more apprehension to the eager forecast of what this child intended
to do when she became a woman, and already shrank from a vision of Celia
on a public platform, or the leader of some metempsychosis club. Through
her affections only was the child manageable, but in opposition to her
spirit her mother was practically powerless. Indeed, this little sprout
of the New Age always spoke of her to Philip and to the Maitlands as
"little mother."

The epithet seemed peculiarly te