ke a weary child.

"It is so pleasant to be here, and it rests me so. I wish I might never
go away. May I stay here, Morris, as your housekeeper, instead of Mrs.
Hull?--that is, if I am not his wife. The world might despise me, but
you would know I was not to blame. I should go nowhere but to the
farmhouse, to church, and baby's grave. Poor baby! I am glad God gave
her to me, even if I am not Wilford's wife; and I am glad now that she
died."

She was talking to herself rather than to Morris, who, smoothing back
her hair and chafing her cold hands, said:

"My poor child, you have passed through some agitating scene. Are you
able now to tell me all about it, and what you mean by another wife?"

He saw she was greatly exhausted, and he brought her a glass of wine,
hoping she would rally. She had no supper, she said, except a cracker
bought in Springfield, but the moment he turned to the bellrope she
begged him not to ring. She was not hungry--she could not eat. She
should never eat again.

Wishing himself to know something definite ere going to Mrs. Hull,
Morris yielded to her entreaties, and sitting down in front of her, said
again: "Now tell me what brought you here without your husband's
knowledge."

There was a shiver, and the white lips grew still whiter as Katy began
her story, going back to St. Mary's churchyard, and then coming to her
first night in New York, when Juno had told her of a picture and asked
her whose it was. Then she told of Wilford's admission of an earlier
love, who, he said, was dead; of the trouble about the baby's name, and
his aversion to Genevra; of his frequent abstracted moods, which she
remembered now, never suspecting at the time their cause, and not
knowing now for certain that Genevra was the subject of his thoughts.
But it was safe to believe almost anything of one who had deceived her
so cruelly, and Katy's blue eyes flashed resentfully as she uttered the
first bitter words she had ever breathed against her husband. But when
she approached the dinner at the elder Cameron's, her lip quivered in a
grieved kind of way as she remembered what Wilford had said of her to
his mother, but she would not tell this to Morris, it was not necessary
to her story, and so she said: "They were talking of what I ought never
to have heard, and it seemed as if the walls were closing me in so that
I could not move to let them know I was there. I said to myself, 'I
shall go mad after this,' and I thoug