ons.

"I believe you're too happy," Jack sometimes said to her. "Try not to
be quite so happy, Kate. At least, try not to take your happiness so
seriously. Please don't adore me so; I'm only a commonplace fellow. And
the babies--they're not going to blow away."

But Kate continued to look with intense eyes at her little world, and
to draw into it with loving and generous hands all who were willing to
come.

"Kate is just like a kite," Jack explained to his father, the major;
"she can't keep afloat without just so many bobs."

Kate's "bobs" were the unfortunates she collected around her. These
absorbed her strength. She felt their misery with sympathies that were
abnormal. The very laborer in the streets felt his toil less keenly than
she, as she watched the drops gather on his brow.

"Is life worth keeping at the cost of a lot like that?" she would ask.
She felt ashamed of her own ease. She apologized for her own serene and
perfect happiness. She even felt sorry for those mothers who had not
children as radiantly beautiful as her own.

"Kate must have a change," the major had given out. He was going West on
business and insisted on taking her with him. Jack looked doubtful.
He wasn't sure how he would get along without Kate to look after
everything. Secretly, he had an idea that servants were a kind of wild
animal that had to be fed by an experienced keeper. But when the time
came, he kissed her good-by in as jocular a manner as he could summon,
and refused to see the tears that gathered in her eyes.

Until Chicago was reached, there was nothing very different from that
which Kate had been in the habit of seeing. After that, she set herself
to watch for Western characteristics. She felt that she would know them
as soon as she saw them.

"I expected to be stirred up and shocked," she explained to the major.
But somehow, the Western type did not appear. Commonplace women with
worn faces--browned and seamed, though not aged--were at the stations,
waiting for something or some one. Men with a hurried, nervous air were
everywhere. Kate looked in vain for the gayety and heartiness which she
had always associated with the West.

After they got beyond the timber country and rode hour after hour on a
tract smooth as a becalmed ocean, she gave herself up to the feeling of
immeasurable vastness which took possession of her. The sun rolled
out of the sky into oblivion with a frantic, headlong haste. Nothing
softened the