ble to sit up
all day, and walk about a little, so if I come I am not needed," and
seating herself at a respectful distance from him, Katy folded her white
hands demurely over her black dress, after having first adjusted the cap
worn constantly since the time when she learned that Morris' sight was
improving.

"I sometimes think I need you more than I did then, and if you must stay
away now, I am ungrateful enough to wish you had not come at all,"
Morris replied, and Katy's cheeks burned crimson as she felt that the
dim eyes, seen through the green shades, were trying to study her as
they had not studied her before. "What is that on your head?" Morris
asked, rather abruptly. "I have tried to make it out, wondering if it
were a handkerchief, and why it was worn."

"It is my cap--the widow's cap--worn for Wilford's sake," was the reply,
which silenced Morris for that time, making him feel that between Katy
Lennox, the girl, and Katy Cameron, the widow, there was a vast
difference, and awakening in his heart a fear lest Wilford Cameron dead
should prove as strong a rival as Wilford living had been.

In his great pity for Katy when she was first a widow, Morris had
scarcely remembered that she was free, or if it did flash upon his mind,
he thrust the thought aside as injustice to the dead; but as the months
and the year went by, and he heard constantly from Helen of Katy's
increasing cheerfulness, it was not in his nature never to think of what
might be, and more than once he had prayed that, if consistent with his
Father's will, that the woman he had loved so well should be his yet. If
not, he could go his way alone, just as he had always done, knowing
that it was right.

Such was the state of Morris' mind when he returned from Washington, but
now it was somewhat different. The weary weeks of sickness, during which
Katy had ministered to him so kindly, had not been without their effect,
and if Morris had loved the frolicsome, childlike Katy Lennox much, he
loved far more the gentle, beautiful woman whose character had been so
wonderfully developed by suffering, and who was now far more worthy of
his love than in her early girlhood.

"I cannot lose her now," was the thought constantly in Morris' mind, as
he experienced more and more how desolate were the days which did not
bring her to him. "It is twenty months, just, since Wilford died; and
George Washington asked Martha Custis for her hand within less time than
that