e summer. Airily she tripped along, her light plaid silk
gleaming through the deep green of the trees and revealing her coming to
the tired man sitting upon a little rustic seat, beneath a chestnut
tree, where he once had sat with Katy, and extracted a cruel sliver from
her hand, kissing the place to make it well as she told him to. She was
a child then, a little girl of twelve, and he was twenty, but the sight
of her pure face lifted confidingly to his had stirred his heart as no
other face had stirred it since, making him look forward to a time when
the hand he kissed would be his own, and his the fairy form he watched
so carefully as it expanded day by day into the perfect woman. He was
thinking of that time now, and how different it had all turned out, when
he heard the bounding step and saw her coming toward him, swinging her
hat in childish abandon, and warbling a song she had learned from him.

"Morris, oh, Morris!" she cried, as she ran eagerly forward; "I am so
glad to see you. It seems so nice to be with you once more here in the
dear old woods. Don't get up--please don't get up," she continued, as he
started to rise.

She was standing before him, a hand on either side of his face, into
which she was looking quite as wistfully as he was regarding her.
Something she missed in his manner, something which troubled her; and
thinking she knew what it was, she said to him: "Why don't you kiss me,
Morris? You used to. Ain't you glad to see me?"

"Yes, very glad," he answered, and drawing her down to the bench beside
him, he kissed her twice, but so gravely, so quietly, that Katy was not
satisfied at all, and tears gathered in her eyes as she tried to think
what it was ailed Morris.

He was very thin, and there were a few white hairs about his temples, so
that, though four years younger than her husband, he seemed to her much
older, quite grandfatherly in fact, and this accounted for the liberties
she took, asking what was the matter, and trying to make him like her
again, by assuring him that she was not as vain and foolish as he must
suppose from what Helen had probably told him of her life since leaving
Silverton.

"I do not like it at all," she said. "I am in it, and must conform; but,
oh Morris! you don't know how much happier I should be if Wilford were
just like you, and lived at Linwood instead of New York. I should be so
happy here with baby all the time."

It was well she spoke that name, for Morris, l