"Yes, it's pretty well," answered Mr. Arbuton, "but it's not such a rare
thing in the East, you know."

"I suppose not. The Ellisons are _not_ an old family. If we went back of
my uncle, we should only come to backwoodsmen and Indian fighters.
Perhaps that's the reason we don't care much for old families. You think
a great deal of them in Boston, don't you?"

"We do, and we don't. It's a long story, and I'm afraid I couldn't make
you understand, unless you had seen something of Boston society."

"Mr. Arbuton," said Kitty, abruptly plunging to the bottom of the
subject on which they had been hovering, "I'm dreadfully afraid that
what you said to me--what you asked of me, yesterday--was all through a
misunderstanding. I'm afraid that you've somehow mistaken me and my
circumstances, and that somehow I've innocently helped on your mistake."

"There is no mistake," he answered, eagerly, "about my loving you!"

Kitty did not look up, nor answer this outburst, which flattered while
it pained her. She said, "I've been so much mistaken myself, and I've
been so long finding it out, that I should feel anxious to have you know
just what kind of girl you'd asked to be your wife, before I--"

"What?"

"Nothing. But I should want you to know that in many things my life has
been very, very different from yours. The first thing I can
remember--you'll think I'm more autobiographical than our driver at
Ha-Ha Bay, even, but I must tell you all this--is about Kansas, where we
had moved from Illinois, and of our having hardly enough to eat or wear,
and of my mother grieving over our privations. At last, when my father
was killed," she said, dropping her voice, "in front of our own door--"

Mr. Arbuton gave a start. "Killed?"

"Yes; didn't you know? Or no: how could you? He was shot by the
Missourians."

Whether it was not hopelessly out of taste to have a father-in-law who
had been shot by the Missourians? Whether he could persuade Kitty to
suppress that part of her history? That she looked very pretty, sitting
there, with her earnest eyes lifted toward his. These things flashed
wilfully through Mr. Arbuton's mind.

"My father was a Free-State man," continued Kitty, in a tone of pride.
"He wasn't when he first went to Kansas," she added simply; while Mr.
Arbuton groped among his recollections of that forgotten struggle for
some association with these names, keenly feeling the squalor of it all,
and thinking still how very pretty