night, his pleasant bass sounding
through the old house.

He was just the sort of man who should have married; but whether he was
held by a romance of the days before he left his western town, or
whether his elderly landlady, knowing that she could not have him
herself was yet successful in guarding him against all comers, it was
certain that he had made love to no woman since he had come to the great
city, until, at thirty-five years of age, he met Kathleen. Then the
pleasant clerk of precise ways, whose sentiment had been satisfied in
singing "lieder" and watering tender plants, was consumed by a great,
unselfish passion. His life no longer moved about his books in the
comfortable cage in the stationer's shop, nor about the boarding-house
room in the quiet street, but day and night it found its happiness, its
sorrow, too, and unrest, in the life of a woman.

It was at the bedside of an acquaintance, a clerk whom he had met in his
work, that he first saw Kathleen. The sick man lived in a dingy,
furnished-room house; and as William Applebaum mounted the stairs,
noticed the dust in rolls against the wall, smelt to-day's dinner and
yesterday's, he found himself extremely sorry for his sick friend. What
must the end be if the beginning was like this? Then, fumbling in the
dark to find his way, the knob on which he had hesitatingly put his hand
was pulled from his fingers, the door opened, and a large, comely woman,
in a nurse's blue dress and white apron, stood before him.

"Is Mr. Saunders here?" he managed to ask.

"Indeed he is," was the answer, "and likely to remain here for some
time. Will you come in and speak to him?"

"If I may."

Mr. Saunders proved to have typhoid fever, not a severe case but a long
one, and Kathleen nursed him with Billy as her faithful assistant. "Mr.
Applebaum is too long a name for so short a man," she explained to him.
"But it's Billy all right with that beard." It was after this that he
kept his beard closely clipped. He shared many a night's work with her;
and long before Mr. Saunders was well, William Applebaum was at the feet
of the lady of his choice.

If she knew it, she gave no sign. But as the sick man grew better and
was able to sit in a chair, propped up with pillows, she stayed on in
the evenings after her assistant came to relieve her, and the three
visited together. Then Kathleen would regale them with stories of her
work and of her plans for the future. She was always g