d comfortably back in his arm-chair
and dried his legs at the grate filled with red-hot coals, while he
listened to the soft rustle of her skirts as she moved noiselessly
about him. It is the peculiarity of women like Kitty, to whom Nature
has denied the governing power of ideas or great personal beauty or
magnetism, such as she gave to Miss Muller, that there is a certain
impalpable force and attraction in their most petty actions and words,
to which men yield. Miss Muller could have watched Kitty all day
dragging chairs and trimming lamps, unmoved farther than to pronounce
her little better than an idiot. But Peter, Muller or John McCall
could not look at her for five minutes without classing her with
Cordelia and Desdemona and all the other sweet fools for whom men have
died, and whom the world yet keeps sacred in pathetic memory. Some
day too, when Catharine should be a mother--though giving to her older
children, little more than to the baby on her breast, soft touches and
gentle words--she would bind them to her as no other kind, of mother
could do--by such bonds that until they were gray-haired no power
should be like hers. Miss Muller neither saw nor foresaw such things.
But Doctor McCall did. "If I had had such a mother I should not have
been what I am," he thought. It was a curious fancy to have about a
young girl. But she seemed to embody all the womanliness that had been
lacking in his life. Of course she was nothing to him. She was to be
that prig Muller's wife, and he was quite satisfied that she should
be. If he married, Maria Muller would be his wife. Yet, oddly enough,
he felt to-night, for the first time, the necessity that Maria should
know how marriage was barred out from him, and felt, for the first
time, too, a maddening anger that it was so barred. However, Doctor
McCall was never meant by Nature for a solitary man housed alone with
morbid thoughts: he was the stuff out of which useful citizens are
made--John Andersons of husbands, doting, gullible fathers.

Remembering the bar in his life, his skeleton, ghost or whatever it
was, he was only moved to get up and stretch himself, saying, "I've
stayed in Berrytown too long. When you have told me your plan, I'll
say good-bye to you, Miss Vogdes, and this old house. I shall be off
to-morrow."

Kitty had just caught a moth in the flame of the candle. She carried
it to the window. "You will come back soon, of course?" her back still
toward him.

"No,