Now it came to the time when Xoa resolved to fulfill the dream of her life and have a bow window of ample dimensions, the model of the one on Sheriff Morton’s big house, where she had worked for years in the kitchen, envying all the time the luxurious ease of the sheriff’s wife lolling on a divan in the window. But this window meant postponing the marriage a year, and with the house so nearly completed Moses had begun to express an entirely natural anxiety to get married. Xoa, with the bow window filling her vision, could not understand this sudden haste in one who had been always as philosophic over delays as she herself. “You think more of your old bow winder than you do of me,” cried Moses, in sudden jealousy. And he sailed away on a trip to the Banks, biting his stubbly gray beard in pique. And ere one week had gone a legacy came to Xoa from her aunt Persis--just enough of a legacy to put on that bow window. So she hired carpenters in haste and set them at work, determined to have her way before the return of Moses. On one evening when the expanse of glass in that window was glowing redly in the beams of the setting sun, the “Xoa and Laura” sailed up the reach with her flag at half mast, and reported the loss of Moses Britt and his dory mate, smashed under in a fog by a roaring steamship. Those who know say that Xoa knelt all night in her new bow window, with her face against the glass, and when morning came she called the carpenters again, and with clamour of hammers and rasp of saws they took off the bow window and boarded the side of the building up. And then--it being a case where the solemn ceremony could be deferred till all was ready--she secured a casket from the city, put into it all the pathetic old clothes that had been turned over to her with Moses’s dunnage-bag, called in the parson and the neighbours, and the funeral of Moses Britt was decorously carried out in a house upon which the soul of the bridegroom-elect could look down from on high and not take exceptions. For forty years after that, until death took her, Xoa lived an old maid in the bow-windowless house. It is not likely that Squire Phin Look used this case or any others similar for precedents in heart affairs, as he would have employed law-court decisions in his legal practice, but he had in his New England temperament a finer grade of the same iron-stone that is found in such dispositions as those of Moses and Xoa. So much for the steadiness and the reserve of his affection in the past.