toes.

There was a moment's silence in which they were both thinking of the
same thing. "I wonder how it's all going inside there?" he remarked. "I
hope all right, but I have my doubts."

"I haven't any doubt at all. It isn't going right," she answered
ruefully; "but it has to be made go right."

"Whom do you think can do that?"

Kitty looked him frankly and decisively in the face. Her eyes had the
look of a dreaming pietist for the moment. The deep-sea soul of her
was awake. "I can do it if they don't break away altogether at once. I
helped her more than you think. I told her I had opened that letter."

He gasped. "My dear girl--that letter--you told her you had done such a
thing, such--!"

"Don't dear girl me, if you please. I know what I am doing. I told her
that and a great deal more. She won't leave this house the woman she was
yesterday. She is having a quick cure--a cure while you wait."

"Perhaps he is cured of her," remarked the Young Doctor very gravely.

"No, no, the disease might have got headway, but it didn't," Kitty
returned, her face turned away. "He became a little better; but he was
never cured. That's the way with a man. He can never forget a woman he
has once cared for, and he can go back to her half loving her; but it
isn't the case with a woman. There's nothing so dead to a woman as a man
when she's cured of him. The woman is never dead to the man, no matter
what happens."

The Young Doctor regarded her with a strange, new interest and a puzzled
surprise. "Sappho--Sappho, how did you come to know these things!" he
exclaimed. "You are only a girl at best, or something of a boy-girl at
worst, and yet you have, or think you have, got into those places which
are reserved for the old-timers in life's scramble. You talk like an
ancient dame."

Kitty smiled, but her eyes had a slumbering look as if she was half
dreaming. "That's the mistake most of you make--men and women. There's
such a thing as instinct, and there's such a thing as keeping your eyes
open."

"What did Mrs. Crozier say when you told her about opening that
five-year-old letter? Did she hate you?"

Kitty nodded with wistful whimsicality. "For a minute she was like an
industrious hornet. Then I made her see she wouldn't have been here at
all if I hadn't opened it. That made, her come down from the top of
her nest on the church-spire, and she said that, considering my
opportunities, I was not such an aboriginal after all."

"