t even worldly women show, who care
for results, not processes.

It had always been the custom of the McMurtagh family to pass the
summers, like the winters, in the little house on Salem Street; but
this year Jamie rented a cottage at Nantasket. He told the Bowdoins
nothing of this move until they asked him about it, observing that he
regularly took the boat. To Jamie it was the next thing to Nahant,
which was of course out of the question. But the queer old clerk was
not fitted to shine in any society, and Mercedes found it hard to make
her way alone. They wandered about the beach, and occasionally to the
great hotel when there was a hop, of evenings, and listened to the
bands; but Mercedes' beauty was too striking and her manners were too
independent to inspire quick confidence in the Nantasket matrons;
while Jamie missed his pipe and shirt-sleeves after supper. He had
asked, and been forbidden, to invite John Hughson down to stay. Still
less would Sadie have her girl acquaintances; and all Salem Street's
kindliest feelings were soured in consequence. There was an invitation
from Nahant that summer, but it seemed, to Mercedes' quick sense,
formal, and she would not go.

She had had her piano moved down "to the beach," at much expense; and
for a week she played in the afternoons. But even this accomplishment
brought her no notice. People would look at her in passing, and then,
more curiously, at her foster-father: that was all. Mercedes, in her
youth, could not realize how social confidence is a plant of slow
growth. The young girls of the place were content with saying she "was
not in their set;" the young men who desired her acquaintance must
seek it surreptitiously, and this Mercedes would not have. The people
of the great hotel were a more mixed set, and among them our couple
was much discussed. Something got to be known of Jamie,--that he was
confidential clerk to the well-known firm of Boston's older
ship-owners, and that she was his adopted daughter. Soon the rumor
grew that he was miserly and rich.

Poor Jamie! He thought more of all these things than Mercedes ever
supposed. What could he do to give her friends of her own age? What
could he do to find her lovers, a husband? McMurtagh slept not nights
for thinking on these things. John Hughson he now saw to be
impossible; Harley Bowdoin was out of the question; but were there not
still genteel youths, clerks like himself, but younger, some class of
life for