III.
THE WIDOW AND HER DAUGHTER.
Mrs. Belding's house was next to that of Mr. Farnham, and the
neighborly custom of Algonquin Avenue was to build no middle walls of
partition between adjoining lawns. A minute's walk, therefore, brought
the young man to the door of Mrs. Belding's cottage. She called it a
cottage, and so we have no excuse for calling it anything else, though
it was a big three-storied house, built of the soft creamy stone of the
Buffland quarries, and it owed its modest name to an impression in the
lady's mind that gothic gables and dormer windows were a necessary
adjunct of cottages. She was a happy woman, though she would have been
greatly surprised to hear herself so described. She had not been out of
mourning since she was a young girl. Her parents, as she sometimes
said, "had put her into black"; and several children had died in
infancy, one after the other, until at last her husband, Jairus
Belding, the famous bridge-builder, had perished of a malarial fever
caught in the swamps of the Wabash, and left her with one daughter and
a large tin box full of good securities.
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