They found the supper table neatly spread for five, and though William’s intention was to spend the night at the village hotel, he accepted Mrs. Howland’s invitation to stay to tea, making himself so much at home, and chatting with all so familiarly, that Aunt Debby pronounced him a clever chap, while Mrs. Howland wondered why people should say the Bellengers of Boston were proud and overbearing. It was late that night when William left them, for there was something very attractive in the blue of Ellen’s eyes, and the shining black of Jessie’s, and when at last he left them, and was alone with himself and the moonlight, he was conscious that there had come to him that day the first unselfish, manly impulse he had known for years. He had mingled much with fashionable ladies. None knew how artificial they were better than himself, and he had come at last to believe that there was not among them a single true, noble-hearted woman. Jessie Graham might be an exception, but even she was tainted with the city atmosphere. Her father’s purse, however, would make amends for any faults she might possess, and he must win that purse at all hazards; but while doing that he did not think it wrong to pay the tribute of admiration to the golden-haired Ellen, whose modest, refined beauty had impressed him so much, and whose artless, childlike manner had affected him more than he supposed. "Little Snow-Drop" he called her to himself, and sitting alone in his chamber at the hotel, he blessed the happy chance which had thrown her in his way. "It is like the refreshing shower to the parched earth," he said, and he thought what happiness it would be to study that pure girl, to see if, far down in the depths of her heart, there were not the germs of vanity and deceit, or better yet, if there were not something in her nature which would sometime respond to him. He did not think of the harm he might do her. He did not care, in fact, even though he won her love only to cast it from him as a useless thing. Country girls like her were only made for men like him to play with. No wonder then if in her dreams that night Ellen moaned with fear of the beautiful serpent which seemed winding itself, fold on fold, about her. Jessie, too, had troubled dreams of felon’s cells, of clanking chains, and even of a gallows, with Walter standing underneath beseeching her to come and share the shame with him. Truly the serpent had entered this Eden and left its poisonous trail.