Mr. William Snow was at present in that preparatory stage of existence known locally as “going to Stevens’”; in other words, he was a daily attendant at the institute of that name, situate on the heights of Hoboken, in the State of New Jersey, and was destined to become one of that army of young electricians who, in point of numbers, threaten to over-run the earth. He wended his way to the college by train each morning as far as the terminus, from thence taking the convenient trolley. His arms were always full of books, from which he studied fitfully as he journeyed.

Mr. Snow was slim and tall, being, in fact, as his mother and sisters admiringly noted, six feet one, with long legs, narrow shoulders, and a small round face of such an open, infantile character that his mother often averred that it had changed in nothing since his babyhood, and that a frilled cap framing his chubby visage would produce the same effect as at that early stage. His name seemed to typify the purity of his nature, as seen through this countenance so fair and fresh, so blue-eyed and guileless, accentuated by the curls of light hair upon his round white forehead. Mrs. Snow was wont to discourse upon her William’s ingenuousness and his freedom from the usual faults of youth in a way that sometimes taxed the gravity of the listener, for, in point of fact, Billy was a young scapegrace whose existence ever since he was in short clothes had been devoted to mischief and levity as much as the limits of circumstance would allow. No one could tell how he had suffered from his mother’s exalted belief in him. She had forbidden him to play with naughty boys whose mischievous pranks he had himself instigated; she had accompanied him to school to point with tense indignation at the injuries he had received from stones thrown by playmates at whom he had had the first convincing “shy”; she had complained untiringly to parents by letter, by his sisters, and by interview, of indignities offered to the clothing and the person of her unoffending son. If Billy hadn’t been the whole-souled and genial boy that he was, he would have been made an outlaw and an object of derision among his kind, but it was an understood thing that, far from being responsible for his mother’s attitude, he writhed under it with an extorted obedience. A certain loyalty to his parent, and also the tongue-tied position of youth toward authority, made it impossible for him fully to state to her how far below her estimate of him he really was; he bore it, instead, with the meekness of an only son whose mother was a widow.

The fact that he was a born lover and had been intermittently experiencing the tender passion since the age of seven, she regarded only as an additional proof of his gentle disposition. She would have liked him to be always in the society of girls instead of those rude boys.

With added years Billy’s outward demeanor had changed in his daily journey toward education. He no longer had scrimmages in the train with school-fellows, in which books of tuition served as weapons of warfare; he no longer harried the brakeman or climbed outside on the ferry-boat, or was chided for outrageous noisiness by long-suffering commuters. But the happy expression of his countenance was usually such a fixture that its marked absence attracted the attention of his fellow-passengers one day in the latter part of January. His face was gloomy and averted; he would not talk. To cheerful questions as to what had disagreed with him, or whether he was “up against it again” at Stevens, his replies were unexpectedly brief, and evinced his desire to be let entirely alone. The change had, in truth, come over him since entering the car, and was caused by the sight of two figures in a seat ahead of him.

The figures were those of a man and a girl, and their conversation had a peculiar air of absorption which seemed to make them alone together in the crowd. Billy could see only the backs of this couple, save when one turned a little sideways to the other, and the round curve of a cheek and a fluff of fair hair became visible, or the bend of an aquiline nose and a dark mustache—the nose and the mustache turned sideways much oftener than the fairer profile. Once or twice Billy caught sight of a pink throat and ear; on such occasions the girl bent her head and fingered nervously at a music-roll she held upright in her hand, and Billy swore under his breath.

When the train had rolled into the station, he went with the other passengers as far as the door of the ferry-house to see—yes, they were going over the same ferry together, he still bending toward her as they walked, she with a charming, shy hesitancy in her manner, as of one unaccustomed to her position. Bill said bitterly, “The gall of him!” and walked away to the humiliating trolley which showed that he was still “going to Stevens’.” If he had been out of bondage, he would have been quick to follow and take his place on the other side of the girl, and show to all men that she was not making one of an intimate duet.

It was after this that his mother noticed that on certain days his accustomed spirits flagged. Her keen ear detected that he no longer whistled cheerily all the time he was dressing, but only when he heard her foot upon the stairs; and although he still chaffed his admiring sisters at dinner, there was a bitter and realistic strain in the jesting that made them all sure that Willie could not feel well. He found fault with his food, also a thing unprecedented. His mother brought him pills which he refused to take, towering above her—she was a little woman—tense and aloof. When she taxed him with having something on his mind, he admitted it at once, in a tone that bade her go no further.

“It is nothing to do with myself,” he conceded, with the spirit of a man looking at her from his baby-blue eyes. The woman in her bowed to it as she went down-stairs, with pride in him rampant in her heart, to deliver her report to the two sisters waiting below.

The Snow family had been settled in the town from its beginning as a suburb, some thirty years back; Mr. Snow having died—after losing money largely on his real-estate investments there—twelve years later, when Billy was an infant, leaving many unproductive tracts of land with large taxes appertaining to them. The Snows knew everybody in the place, rich and poor, and were consequently regarded somewhat in the light of a directory; the woman by the day, the cheap dressmaker, and the handy man or boy could always be achieved by applying to them, for they had an invariable acquaintance with respectable persons temporarily forced into filling these positions. They themselves, while adding to their own finances in various ways, neither concealed nor obtruded the fact; their affairs could interest no one but themselves. They lived in a very small old-fashioned white frame house with a narrow entrance-hall nearly level with the street; and the little low-ceiled parlor and sitting-room, with their narrow doorways and slightly uneven floors, were crowded with large mahogany and walnut furniture and bedecked with the birthday and Christmas gifts of the family for the last thirty years, from the cherry-stone basket once carved by Father to the ornamental hanging calendar of the past season. In the autumn the ladies potted plants with such accumulative energy that the rooms became more and more a jungle of damp pots and tubs, topped by overflowing showers and spikes and flat blobs of green. Only the family knew exactly where to sit without encroaching perilously on these; Billy’s friends always dropped first into a certain chair and rocked into a dangling mass of Wandering Jew on the marble-topped table behind.

The Snows had the recognized position in society of being Asked to Everything. When they went to entertainments, it was in the dark, quiet garments of every-day life, or the one often remodeled state robe belonging to each, irrespective of what other people wore. Their circumstances and their birth were too well known to need pretense.

Ada, the second daughter, taught in a school. She was twenty-seven, tall like her brother, and with a fair, babyish face like his. It seems to be the rule in the pages of fiction, even at the present day, to depict unmarried women of this age as both feeling and looking no longer young—as a matter of fact, a girl of twenty-seven is rarely distinguishable from one of twenty-three, and is often more attractive. Ada Snow had been, besides, one of those immature young persons who grow up late, and become graceful and natural in society only after long custom; at twenty, shy and awkward, she had usually been mistaken for sixteen. She was her brother’s favorite, secretly aiding and abetting him in many evasions of the maternal law; she tied his cravats for him now, and got up little suppers for him, and he posed as her elder, in view of his height and large experience.

The other sister, Bertha, was a delicate and much older woman, dark-haired, lined and sallow, given to intermittent nerve-prostrations and neuralgia, yet keeping a certain sanity and strength of mind hidden beneath an accumulation of small interests. She seldom went out, but sat by a window in the sitting-room all day, screened by the steaming plants, embroidering on linen, and keeping tally of the persons who went up and down the street, the number of oranges bought out of a cart, and the frequency of the meetings of two servants over a boundary fence—incidents of note in themselves without further connection. She seemed almost inconceivably petty in conversation and idea, but if one were strong enough to speak only to the truth that was in her, she could answer. She was honest and she was loyal; she knew a friend. She had worked hard for her mother in her early youth—that little mother who now looked almost younger than she, as she came into the room from her interview with William, and sat down by her daughter to say, in a tone of the mother who believes no secret is hid from her: “William won’t tell me what’s the matter, but I know it’s something to do with that girl at the Alexanders’. Willie is growing up so fast!”

“Oh, yes, if you mean Miss Linden,” said Miss Bertha, in comfortable corroboration. “That’s been going on for some weeks.”

“Yes, I know; but he acts differently this time. Perhaps she’s snubbed him in some way.”

“No, he was there the other night, and he is to take her skating Saturday. I saw the note open on his bureau. Maybe, after all, it’s just being in love that upsets him.”

“Yes, I really think that’s all.”

Miss Bertha put her work down on her lap, and smoothed it out with slender, nervous fingers, before rolling it up in a thin white cloth. The daylight was beginning to go.

“He’s got a rose she gave him,—never mind how I know,—and he keeps it wrapped up in tissue”—she pronounced it “tisher”—“paper in his waistcoat pocket. He leaves it in there sometimes when he changes his clothes. And Ada says—you know that picture in the magazine that we all said looked so like Miss Linden? He’s got it in a little frame. Ada says that it tumbles out from underneath his pillow once in a while when she’s taking the covers off; I suppose the child puts it there at night and forgets it in the morning. Ada just slips it half-way back again when she makes up the bed, as if she’d overlooked it. He never says anything, and of course she doesn’t, either.”

“I hope the girl will not take his attentions seriously,” said the mother, alarmed. She had known all this before, but it was a fashion of the family to talk over and over what they already knew. “I hope she will not take him seriously.”

“Mother! They’re both so young.” Ada, who had been leaning forward with her face in her hands and her chin upturned at a statuesque angle, spoke for the first time.

“Oh, that’s very well!” Mrs. Snow tossed her head as one with experience. “He is, of course, nothing but a mere boy at nineteen, but a girl of twenty is years older. When a girl is twenty, she goes in society with women of any age. I was married myself at eighteen—not that I should wish either of my daughters to do so.”

“Well, you can feel safe about that, mother,” interpolated Ada.

“William is very attractive, dear boy, and I could not blame any girl for being somewhat captivated by him; I should be sorry if Miss Linden allowed her affections to be engaged. She may not know that his career is mapped out before him. William will not be in a position to marry before he is thirty-six. William is——”

“The people are coming from the train,” interposed Miss Bertha, waving back one thin hand to stop her mother’s discourse—which she could have repeated backward—and scanning the hurrying file in the dusk across the street.

“Now you can tell how long the days are getting. Ada, come here. Mrs. Leverich has on her new furs—the ones her husband gave her. Don’t they make her look stout? There are the Brentons, I think that’s a bag of coffee he’s carrying. He has a long, narrow package, too, with square ends—perhaps she’s been buying corsets; if not, it must be a bottle of whisky. And there—who is that? Oh, I thought it was Mr. Alexander in a new coat; of course it’s too early for him—they say he’s been making money hand over hand lately. And here comes—why it’s George Sutton! Ada, Ada, bow! he’s looking. He sees us waving—ah!”

There was a pause, in which an interested flush appeared on the cheeks of both sisters.

The mother murmured apprehensively, “They say he is devoted to Miss Linden,” but neither answered. Ada had benefited, like the other girls, by his attentions, she had been given candy and flowers and made one in his theater-parties, but it was the secret conviction of all three women that all his general attentions were simply a cloak for his real devotion to Ada. The others were just a circle—she was the particular one; and Heaven only knows how many girls in this circle shared the same conviction. His smile and nod now seemed to speak of an intimacy that blotted out all his preference for Miss Linden.

“You had better pull down the shade now,” said Mrs. Snow, after a few minutes. “It’s time to light the lamp.”

“No, wait a moment—there’s another train in.” Miss Bertha’s eyes pierced the gloom. “The Carpenter boys, those new people in the Farley house, and that’s all. No, there’s somebody ’way behind—I declare, it’s Miss Linden! She’s ever so much more stylish-looking than she was at first. I wonder she didn’t come on the train ahead. Who can that be with her? Why—” there was a pause. “I suppose he must have just happened to get off with her at the station,” said Miss Bertha in an altered voice.

“Oh, yes; I’m sure that’s it,” said Ada.