idden subject to Kitty. Her heart her mother supposed, slept, like
the summer dawn, full of dreams, passion, dewy tenderness, waiting for
the touch of the coming day. What kind of awakening would the plump
"Will you marry me?" of this fat little clergyman be? In the street
of Berry town, too! in the middle of the afternoon! If it were only
moonlight!

"Pray wait until evening, Catharine: you're always famished for your
supper," she cried anxiously.

"But I'm not hungry now at all," running up the stairs. For
politeness' sake Kitty would lie with a smile on her mouth though a
fox were gnawing at her stomach. Something in her running reminded Mr.
Muller that she was a school-girl and he a middle-aged noted reformer.
He fidgeted about the room, looking at the prints of La Fayette and
Franklin on the whitewashed wall, and the Tomb of Washington done in
faded chenilles by Mr. Guinness's first wife, buttoning his gloves
with an anxious frown.

"I'm sure I don't know what my sister Maria will say to this," after
one or two uneasy laughs. "I never mean to be eccentric, yet somehow
I always am different from anybody else. Now, in church-matters--_I_
never intended to leave the orthodox communion, yet when I showed how
my Church was clinging to worn-out dogmas, and opened my Reformatory
in Berrytown, the Free-Religionists in Boston seized me, and printed
my opening sermon under one cover with that of an Oneidaite and a
Spiritualist. Do _I_ look like a medium or a Free-Lover? That was
going a little too far, I take it."

"Ah?" came Mrs. Guinness's calm interrogatory. No more.

William Muller was a man of culture and a certain force in one
direction, and when pleading the cause of the vicious children to
whom he was giving his life could hold men of real mental strength
attentive and subdued. He did not know why, when this commonplace
little woman had her steady eye on him, he should always dribble out
all his weakness to her. But he did it--talked on in a leaky way
of his squabble with his church and the praises he had received in
newspapers for his school, until he heard Kitty's step on the stairs.

"Ah! there she is!" he cried relieved.

Catharine came back, close buttoned in a brown dress, with high-laced
boots, and a light stick in her hand. She used to call it her
alpenstock, and make all Switzerland out of the New Jersey sands with
it. She ran in to kiss her father good-bye, blushing and delighted.
It was the first