. At least
that was conceivable. Now her want was met. Not only was there this to
fill her heart, but remorse, the tenderest a woman may know, it seems to
me--remorse for undeserved suspicion.

In a setting less prosaic than Little Arcady, where events might be of a
story-fitness, that lover would have been alive by a happy chance,
estranged by the misunderstanding but splendidly faithful, and I should
have been helper and interested witness to an ideal reconciliation;
thereafter to play out my game with a full heart, though with an
exterior placidly unconcerned. But with us events halt always a little
short of true romance. They are unexcitingly usual.

I would have to play out my game full heartedly, nursing my powers of
belief back to their one-time vigor; nothing would occur to ease my
lot--not even an occasion to pretend that I gave my blessing to a
reunited and happy pair. Miss Kate could go on believing. Unwittingly I
had given her the stuff for belief. I, too, must go on believing, and
providing my own material, as had ever been my lot; all of which was why
my dog seemed my most profitable companion at this time. His every bark
at a threatening baby-carriage a block away, each fresh time he believed
sincerely that a rubber shoe was engaging in deadly struggle with him,
taxing all his forces to subdue it, each time he testified with
sensitive, twitching nostrils that the earth is good with innumerable
scents, each streaking of his glad-tongued white length over yellowing
fields designed solely for his recreation held for me a certain soothing
value. And when in quiet moments he assured me with melting gaze that I
was a being to challenge the very heart of love--in some measure, at
least, did my soul gain strength from his own.

To know as much as I have indicated had been unavoidable for one of any
intuitive powers. The change at once to be detected in Miss Kate's
manner toward me confirmed my divinations without enlarging them. Miss
Katharine Lansdale was gone forever; in her place was a Miss Kate,--even
a Little Miss to the eye,--who regarded me at first with an undisguised
alarm, then with a curious interfusion of alarm and shyness, a little
disguised with not a little effort. This was plain reading. She would at
first have distrusted me, apprehending I know not what rashness of
ill-timed and forever impossible declarations. As she perceived this
alarm to be baseless, for I not only refrained from intruding