wy, like his hair. In those days still a mustache bore with it
some audacity, and gave a man who frankly lived outside the reputable
callings something of the buccaneer. St. Clair called himself a
gentleman, but did not pretend to be a clerk, and frankly avowed that
he was not in trade. Jamie could not make him out at all. He hoped,
indeed, he was a gentleman. Had he been in the old country, he could
have credited it better; but gentlemen without visible means of
support were, in those days, unusual in Boston.

Poor Jamie watched his daughter like any dowager, that summer. But the
consciousness of his own sin (for so now he always thought of it)
troubled him terribly. How could he urge his lady to repel the
advances of this man without being open to the charge of selfishness,
of jealousy? Jamie forgot that the girl had never known he loved her.

He made feeble attempts to egg on Hughson. The honest teamster was but
a lukewarm lover. His point of view was that the girl looked down upon
him, and this chilled his passion. He had come to own his teams now.
He never drove them. He was a capitalist, an employer of labor; and,
at Jamie's request, he came down one night, in black broadcloth and
red-handed, to pass the night. But it did not work. When Mr. St. Clair
called in the evening, he adopted a tone of treating both Jamie and
Hughson as elderly pals, so that the latter lost his temper, and, as
Mercedes claimed, insulted his elegant rival.

Then Jamie bade Hughson to come no more, for his love for Mercedes was
so true that he felt in his heart why St. Clair appealed more to hers.

But the summer was a long and anxious one, and he was glad when it was
over and they were back in Salem Street. They had made no other
acquaintance at Nantasket. "Society" to Jamie remained a sealed book.
Clever Mercedes was not clever enough to see he knew she blamed him
for it. St. Clair only laughed. "These people are nobody," said he;
and he talked of fashionable and equipaged friends he had known in
other places. Where? Jamie suspected, race-courses; his stories of
them bore usually an equine flavor. But he was not a horse-dealer; his
hands were too white for that.

Poor old Mr. Bowdoin had had a hangdog feeling with old Jamie ever
since that day his son had laughed. He had dared criticise nothing he
noticed at the office, and Jamie grew more crusty and eccentric every
day. James Bowdoin was less indulgent, and soon saw that something new