to win her
away from Westcott, not by argument, to which she was invulnerable, but
by feeling. He found that the only motive that moved her was an emotion
of pity for him, so he contrived to make her estimate his misery on her
account at its full value. But just when he thought he had produced some
effect there would come one of Smith Westcott's letters, written not as
he talked (it is only real simpleheartedness or genuine literary gift
that can make the personality of the writer felt in a letter), but in a
round business hand with plenty of flourishes, and in sentences very
carefully composed. But he managed in his precise and prim way to convey
to Katy the notion that he was pining away for her company. And she,
missing the giggle and the playfulness from the letter, thought his
distress extreme indeed. For it would have required a deeper sorrow than
Smith Westcott ever felt to make him talk in the stiff conventional
fashion in which his letters were composed.

And besides Westcott's letters there were letters from her mother, in
which that careful mother never failed to tell how Mr. Westcott had come
in, the evening before, to talk about Katy, and to tell her how lost and
heart-broken he was. So that letters from home generally brought on a
relapse of Katy's devotion to her lover. She was cruelly torn by
alternate fits of loving pity for poor dear Brother Albert on the one
hand, and poor, dear, _dear_ Smith Westcott on the other. And the latter
generally carried the day in her sympathies. He was such a poor dear
fellow, you know, and hadn't anybody, not even a mother, to comfort him,
and he had often said that if his charming and divine little Katy should
ever prove false, he would go and drown himself in the lake. And that
would be _so_ awful, you know. And, besides, Brother Albert had plenty to
love him. There was mother, and there was that quiet kind of a young lady
at the City Hotel that Albert went to see so often, though how he could
like anybody so cool she didn't know. And then Cousin Isa would love
Brother Albert maybe, if he'd ask her. But he had plenty, and poor Smith
had often said that he needed somebody to help him to be good. And she
would cleave to him forever and help him. Mother and father thought she
was right, and she couldn't anyway let Smith drown himself. How could
she? That would be the same as murdering him, you know.

During the fortnight that Charlton and his sister visited in Glenfield,