nd then--she came! Oh! Brace, a man can never know how a woman feels
at such a moment--you see there were some sheets of your manuscript on
the table--I was looking at them when the girl came in. Brace, she was
quite awful; she frightened me terribly. She asked who I was and I
told her--I thought that would at least make her see my side; explain
things--but it did not! She was--she was"--Kathryn ventured a bolder
dash--"she was quite violent. I cannot remember all she said--she said
so much--a girl does when she realizes what _she_ must have realized.
Oh! Brace, I tried to be kind, but I had to take your part and she
turned me out!"

In all this Northrup felt his way as one does along a narrow passage
beset on either side with dangers. Characteristically he saw his own
wrong in originally creating the situation. Not for an instant did he
doubt Kathryn's story; indeed, she rose in his regard; for he felt for
her deeply. He had, unwittingly, set a trap for her innocent, girlish
feet; brought her to bay with what she could not possibly understand;
and the belief that she had been merciful, had accepted, in silence,
at a time when his trouble absorbed her, touched and humiliated him;
and yet, try as he did to consider only Kathryn, he could not
disregard Mary-Clare. He could not picture her in a coarse rage; the
idea was repellent, but he acknowledged that the dramatic moment,
lived through by two stranger-women with much at stake, was beyond his
powers of imagination. The great thing that mattered now was that his
duty, since a choice must be made, was to Kathryn. By every right, as
he saw it, she must claim his allegiance. And yet, what was there to
be done?

Northrup was silent; his inability to express himself condemned him in
her eyes, and yet, strangely enough, he had never been more desirable
to her.

"Marry me, dear. Let me prove my love to you. No matter what lies back
there, I forgive everything! That is what love means to a woman like
me."

Love! This poor, shabby counterfeit.

With a sickening sense of repulsion Northrup drew back, and
maddeningly his book, not Kathryn, seemed to fill his aching
brain. With this conception of love revealed--how blindly he had
misunderstood. He tried to speak; did speak at last--he heard his
words, but was not conscious of their meaning.

"You are wrong, child. Whatever folly was committed in King's Forest
was mine, not that girl's. I suppose I was a bit mad without knowi