line she had marked out for herself. She
was not, in the modern sense of the word, a strong-minded young woman,
this sorely beset champion of the overborne. She hadn't even the
perversity of the sex in love. Chivalrously as she loved the lost
soldier, she loved her father with that old-fashioned veneration which
made her see all that he did with the moral indistinctness, without
which there could not be the perfect filial devotion that makes the
family a union in good report and evil. She had not even that, by no
means repellent, secondary egoism which upholds us in doing ungrateful
things that abstract good may follow. Opposition, which becomes
delightful when we can call it persecution, had no charm for her. If her
father had suddenly adopted the _role_ of the stern parent in novels and
ordered her to her chamber, Kate would have regarded it as a joke, and
felt rather relieved that she could thus escape the pledge given to the
Spragues. But, as it was, she felt morally bound by her promise to
Olympia; and, though she realized dimly that her instrumentality was
slowly involving her father in a coil of unloveliness, she resolutely
braced herself for the worst. In spite of herself she had believed in
conquering her father's severity and changing his mind. She had rescued
him from revenges quite as dear to him as this, at least so far as she
understood it, forgetting that her father believed himself to be
pursuing the deliberate murderer of his son. When we have achieved a
victory over our own less noble impulses and put the sophistries that
misled us behind us, it is impossible to realize that others have not
the same vision, the same mind as our own. Kate had accused Jack of
cold-blooded murder. She had reasoned herself out of that hateful
spirit, and, forgetting that her father had not the vital force of love
to act as a fulcrum, she could not quite comprehend how difficult it was
to shift the wrathful burden in his mind. She had gone too far to recede
now with honor. Olympia had trusted her, had indeed given over into her
hands the active work of finding the strangely lost clew of Jack's
whereabouts. Perhaps for her father's sake it was better that she should
be the instrument. She might be able to dissemble his intervention,
shield him from obloquy--if, as she feared, he was responsible for
anything doubtful.

She knew her father too well to suppose that he would flinch from any
measure he had proposed to himself. Sh