s, mummy," she said gently. "Let that be one of my
fixed duties from now on."

"You'll spoil your mother, Kate," said the doctor with a whimsical
intonation.

His jesting about what had so marred the hour of reunion brought a surge
of anger to Kate's brain.

"That's precisely what I came home to do, sir," she said significantly.
"What other reason could I have for coming back to Silvertree? The town
certainly isn't enticing. You've been doctoring here for forty years,
but you havn't been able to cure the local sleeping-sickness yet."

It stung and she had meant it to. To insult Silvertree was to hurt the
doctor in his most tender vanity. It was one of his most fervid beliefs
that he had selected a growing town, conspicuous for its enterprise. In
his young manhood he had meant to do fine things. He was
public-spirited, charitable, a death-fighter of courage and persistence.
Though not a religious man, he had one holy passion, that of the
physician. He respected himself and loved his wife, but he had from
boyhood confused the ideas of masculinity and tyranny. He believed that
women needed discipline, and he had little by little destroyed the
integrity of the woman he would have most wished to venerate. That she
could, in spite of her manifest cowardice and moral circumventions,
still pray nightly and read the book that had been the light to
countless faltering feet, furnished him with food for acrid sarcasm. He
saw in this only the essential furtiveness, inconsistency, and
superstition of the female.

The evening dragged. The neighbors who would have liked to visit them
refrained from doing so because they thought the reunited family would
prefer to be alone that first evening. Kate did her best to preserve
some tattered fragments of the amenities. She told college stories,
talked of Lena Vroom and of beautiful Honora Fulham,--hinted even at Ray
McCrea,--and by dint of much ingenuity wore the evening away.

"In the morning," she said to her father as she bade him good-night,
"we'll both be rested." She had meant it for an apology, not for herself
any more than for him, but he assumed no share in it.

Up in her room her mother saw her bedded, and in kissing her
whispered,--

"Don't oppose your father, Kate. You'll only make me unhappy. Anything
for peace, that's what I say."

III

It was sweet to awaken in the old room. Through the open window she
could see the fork in the linden tree and the squirrels mak