with the fresh one, tied the tie and
gave it a perfecting little pat. "There--that's better! And now I must
be off. I'll send around a few policemen to keep the crowds off Aunt
Rachel's flower-beds."

And pressing on his pale cheek another kiss, and smiling at him from
the door, she hurried out.

CHAPTER IV

DOCTOR WEST'S LAWYER

Katherine's refusal of Harrison Blake's unforeseen proposal, during
the summer she had graduated from Vassar, had, until the present hour,
been the most painful experience of her life.

Ever since that far-away autumn of her fourteenth year when Blake had
led an at-first forlorn crusade against "Blind Charlie" Peck and swept
that apparently unconquerable autocrat and his corrupt machine from
power, she had admired Blake as the ideal public man. He had seemed so
fine, so big already, and loomed so large in promise--it was the fall
following his proposal that he was elected lieutenant-governor--that
it had been a humiliation to her that she, so insignificant, so
unworthy, could not give him that intractable passion, love. But
though he had gone very pale at her stammered answer, he had borne his
disappointment like a gallant gentleman; and in the years since then
he had acquitted himself to perfection in that most difficult of
roles, the lover who must be content to be mere friend.

Katherine still retained her girlish admiration of Mr. Blake. Despite
his having been so conspicuous at the forefront of public affairs, no
scandal had ever soiled his name. His rectitude, so said people whose
memories ran back a generation, was due mainly to fine qualities
inherited from his mother, for his father had been a good-natured,
hearty, popular politician with no discoverable bias toward
over-scrupulosity. In fact, twenty years ago there had been a great
to-do touching the voting, through a plan of the elder Blake's
devising, of a gang of negroes half a dozen times down in a
river-front ward. But his party had rushed loyally to his rescue, and
had vindicated him by sending him to Congress; and his sudden death on
the day after taking his seat had at the time abashed all accusation,
and had suffused his memory with a romantic afterglow of sentiment.

Blake lived alone with his mother in a house adjoining the Wests',
and a few moments after Katherine had left her father she turned into
the Blakes' yard. The house stood far back in a spacious lawn, shady
with broad maples and aspiring pines,