eep----"

"Kate!"

She held him tightly by his arm, and looked with eyes that were dimmed
with tears of most blessed relief upon the working of his face.

As, later, they went together through the little garden, and passed
again the rudely-chalked question upon the gate--"Shall I stay here
with you, and face the music," Kate Grantley asked, "or will you come
away with me to Paris?"

"AS 'TWAS TOLD TO ME"

Her husband had died suddenly in the third year of their marriage, and
she had been left a young widow with their only child.

The husband had been dead a year--a year passed in close seclusion in
her country home--when she went out on a bright morning of the early
spring, taking her little daughter with her, to gather primroses in the
plantation bordering one extremity of the park around her house.

She had remembered when she arose in the morning that the day was the
anniversary of her husband's death.

A year only! It had seemed like twenty years. For she was very young,
and fairly rich and much admired, and the life she had hitherto led had
not prepared her to support loneliness and retirement profitably. The
shock of the sudden death had been terrible. She had thought that she
should die of it; but she did not even fall ill. And there was the
child, whom she adored. And later there had arisen a new interest.

The new interest, in the form of Major Harold Walsh, was at her elbow
on this kind morning of sweetest spring. He was a middle-aged man, with
a handsome, hard face and a very tender manner, and he chose, as some
may think inopportunely, the anniversary of the husband's death to make
the widow an offer of marriage.

The widow reminded him of what had happened on that day a year ago,
pointed out that she could not possibly entertain such a proposition so
soon, even cried a little when she spoke of her husband. But in no
other way did she discourage the tender-mannered major with the hard
face.

It would have been well-nigh impossible for a man to make an offer of
marriage with a child of three years old clinging to her mother's
skirts and incessantly babbling in her mother's ear; so the child with
her nurse was sent into the interior of the plantation, in search of
the lovely primroses said to flourish there, while the two elders
wandered with slow steps and down-bent eyes upon the outskirts of the
coppice.

So they would have been content to wander for hours, perhaps--he
begging for ass