BERRYTOWN.

I

A straggling old house, painted yellow, and set down between a corn-field and the village pasture for family cows; old walnut trees growing close to its back and front, young walnut trees thrusting themselves unhindered through beet and tomato patches, and even through the roof of the hennery in the rear, which had been rebuilt to accommodate them, spreading a heavy shade all about, picturesque but unprofitable.

Old Peter Guinness used to sit on the doorstep every hot summer evening, smoking his cigar, and watching the hens go clucking up to roost in the lower branches and the cattle gathered underneath.

"What a godsend the trees are to those poor beasts!" he said a dozen times every summer.

"Yes. We risk dampness and neuralgia and ague to oblige the town cows," Mrs. Guinness would reply calmly.

"I shall cut them down this fall, Fanny. I'm not unreasonable, I hope. Don't say a word more: I forgot your neuralgia, my dear. Down they come!"

But they never did come down. Mrs. Guinness never expected them to come down, any more than she expected Peter to give up his cigar. When they were first married she explained to him daily the danger of smoking, the effect of nicotine on the lungs, liver and stomach: then she would appeal to him on behalf of his soul against this debasing temptation of the devil. "It is such a gross way to fall," she would plead—"such a mean, sensual appetite!"

Peter was always convinced, yielding a ready assent to all her arguments: then he would turn his mild, cow-like regards on her: "But, my dear, I smoke the best Partagas: they're very expensive, I assure you."

Long ago his wife had left him to go his own way downward. As with smoking, so with other ungodly traits and habits. She felt his condemnation was sure. It was a case for submission at the female prayer-meeting; bemoaning his eternal damnation became indeed a part of her religion, but the matter was not one to render her apple-cheeks a whit less round or her smile less placid. The mode in which Peter earned their bread and butter interfered more with her daily comfort and digestion. Dealing in second-hand books, half of which were dramatic works, was a business not only irreligious, but ungenteel. She never passed under the swinging sign over the door without feeling that her cross was indeed heavy, and the old parlor, which had been turned into a shop, she left to the occupancy of her husband and Kitty.

Out of the shop, one summer afternoon, had come for an hour the perpetual scrape, scrape of Peter's fiddle. He jumped up at last, suddenly, bow in hand, and went to the doorstep, where his stepdaughter sat sewing. From the words he had overheard in the next room he was sure that the decisive hour of life had just struck for the girl, and there she was stitching her flannel and singing about "Alpine horns, tra-la!" She ought to have known, he thought, without hearing. A woman ought to be of the kindred of the old seeresses, and by the divine ichor or the animal instinct in her know when the supreme moment of love approached.

But what kind of love was this coming to Kitty?

He twanged the strings just over her head, to keep her from hearing, but quite out of tune, he was so agitated with the criticalness of the moment. But then most moments were critical to Peter Guinness, and agitation, his wife was wont smilingly to assure him, was his normal condition.

He anxiously watched Catharine's restless glances into the room where her  mother and the clergyman sat in council. She had guessed their object then? She was opposed to it?

A thoughtful frown contracted her forehead. Suddenly it cleared: "Oysters? Yes, it is oysters Jane is broiling. I'm horribly hungry. I could go round the back way and bring us a little lunch in here, father. They'll never see us behind the books."

"Shame on you, Kit! You're nothing but a greedy child." But he laughed with a sudden sense of relief. She really was nothing yet but a healthy child with a very sharp remembrance of meal-times. It would be years before her mother or Mr. Muller would talk to her of the marriage or the work they had planned for her.

"Just as you please," taking up her flannel again. "Very likely it will be midnight before we have supper: Mr. Muller often forgets to eat altogether. From what mother tells me, I suppose approving conscience and a plate of grits now and then carry him through the day. It's different with me."

"Very different, Kitty. Don't flatter yourself that you will ever be like him in any way. William Muller is a Christian of the old type. Though, as for grits, a man should not disregard the requirements of the stomach too much," with an inward twinge as he smelt the oysters. He began to play thoughtfully, while Kitty looked again through the book-shop to the room beyond. The books about her always made unfamiliar pictures when one looked at them suddenly. They lay now in such weights of age and mustiness on the floor, the counters, the beams overhead, the yellow walls of them were lost in such depths of cobwebs and gloom, that they made a dark retreating frame, in which she sat like a clear, fine picture in the doorway, the yellow sunset light behind her. She could see her mother looking in at her, and the plump, neat little clergyman in his tight-fitting ribbed suit of brown and spotless shirt-front. He gently stroked his small black imperial as he talked, but his eyes behind their gold eye-glasses never wavered in their mild regard of her. Kitty grew restless under it.

"Mr. Muller is talking of the class of books you keep, father," she said, lowering her voice: "I'm sure of it. They are as unsavory in his nostrils as to the reformers in the village. They'd all excommunicate you if they could."

"Guinness, Book Agent, Kitty," finishing his tune with a complacent scrape, "has been known for twenty years, while Berrytown belongs to yesterday. But the intolerance of these apostles of toleration is unaccountable. They mean well, though. I really never knew people mean better; yet—" He finished the sentence with a shake of the head, solemnly burying the fiddle in its case.

Both he and Catharine turned involuntarily to the window. Five years ago there had been half a dozen old buildings like the Book-house stretched along Indian Creek, the roofs curled and black, the walls bulging with age and damp. Now, there was Berrytown.

Berrytown was the Utopia in actual laths, orchards and bushel-measures of the advance-guard of the reform party in the United States. It was the capital of Progress, where social systems and raspberries grew miraculously together. Thither hied every man who had any indictment against the age, or who had invented an inch-rule of a theory which was to bring the staggering old world into shape. Woman-Suffrage, Free-Love, Spiritualism, off-shoots from Orthodoxy in every sect, had there food and shelter. Radical New England held the new enterprise dear as the apple of her eye: Western New York stretched toward it hands of benediction. As Catharine looked out, not a tree stood between her and the sky-line. Row after row of cottages replete with white paint and the modern conveniences; row after row of prolific raspberry bushes on the right, cranberry bogs on the left—the great Improved Canning-houses for fruit flanking the town on one side, Muller's Reformatory for boys on the other. The Book-house behind its walnut trees, its yellow walls clammy with lichen, was undeniably a blot, the sole sign of age and conservatism  in a landscape which, from horizon to horizon, Reform swept with the newest of brooms. No wonder that the Berrytownites looked askance at it, and at the book-fanciers who had haunted the place for years, knowing old Guinness to be the keenest agent they could put upon the trail of a pamphlet or relic.

The old man grew surly sometimes when sorely goaded by the new-comers. "There's not a man of them, Kitty," he would say, "but has ideas; and there's not an idea in the town five years old." But generally he was cordial with them all, going off into rapt admiration of each new prophet as he arose, and he would willingly have stood cheek by jowl with them in their planting and watering and increase if they had not snubbed him from the first. Book-shops full of old plays, and a man who talked of Scott's width of imagination and Clay's statesmanship, were indigestible matter which Berrytown would gladly have spewed out of her mouth. "What have aimless imagination and temporizing policy to do with the Advancement of Mankind? Dead weight, sir, dead weight! which but clogs the wheels of the machine." Any schoolboy in Berrytown could have so reasoned you the matter. While Catharine was growing up, therefore, the walnut trees had shut the Guinnesses into complete social solitude until deliverance came in the shape of Mr. Muller.

II

Besides her supper now, Catharine wanted her share of this visitor. Nothing else, in fact, came in or went out of her life. Outside lay emancipated Berrytown, to unemancipated Kitty only a dumb panorama: inside, her meals, her lessons and perpetual consultations with her mother on bias folds and gussets while they made their dresses or sewed for the Indian missions. Kitty was quite willing to believe that the Berrytown women were mad and unsexed, but ought the events of life to consist of beef and new dresses and far-off Sioux? She laughed good-humoredly at her own grumbling, but she looked longingly out of the window at the girls going by chattering in the evenings with their sweet-hearts; and certainly the Man coming into her life had affected her not unpleasantly. Not that the clergyman, with his small jokes and small enthusiasms, was any high revelation to her mind; but there was no other.

"It's something to hear a heavy step about the house, and to see the carpet kicked crooked," she said sometimes. Her mother would shake her hand gently and smile.

She shook her head and smiled in precisely the same way now. Mr. Muller, who had grown excited as he talked, felt a wave of insipid propriety wash over his emotions, bringing them to a dead level.

"However the matter may conclude," said Mrs. Guinness pleasantly, "why should you and I lose our self-control, Mr. Muller? Now, why should we? Ah?"

There was something numbing in the very note of prolonged interrogation. The folds of Mrs. Guinness's glossy alpaca lay calmly over her plump breast; her colorless hair (both her own and the switch) rolled and rose high above her head; her round cheeks were unchanging pink, her light eyes steady; the surprised lift of those flaxen eyelashes had made many a man ashamed of his emotions and his slipshod grammar together.

Mr. Muller was humbled, he did not know why. "It is practical enough, I suppose," he said irritably, "to ask what Catharine herself thinks of marriage with me?"

"You never tried to discover for yourself?" with an attempt at roguish shrewdness.

"No, upon my honor, no!" The little man fairly lost his breath in his haste. "I have a diffidence in speaking to her."

"To Kitty!" with an amused, indulgent smile, which worsted him again.

He struggled back into the hardest common sense: "Of course it is not diffidence in me. I feel no hesitation in discussing the question of marriage with  anybody else. My family wish me to marry: my sister has suggested several young ladies to me in well-to-do religious families in the city. There are marriageable young women here, too, whose acquaintance I have made with that object in view. Very intelligent girls: they have given me some really original views on religion and politics. One can talk to them about anything—social evils or what not. But Catharine—she is so young! It is like broaching marriage to a baby!"

Mrs. Guinness was silent. The sudden silence struck like a dead wall before the little man, and bewildered and alarmed him: "Perhaps, Mrs. Guinness, you think I ought not to look upon Catharine as another man would? I should regard a wife only as a fellow-servant of the Lord? I oughtn't to—to make love to Kitty, in short?"

"She is a dear, pious child. I love to think of her in the midst of your Reformed boys," said the lady evasively.

There was another pause. "Of course, you know," he said with an anxious laugh, "I never had a serious thought of those young ladies chosen by my sister. Social position or wealth does not weigh with me, Mrs. Guinness—not a feather!" earnestly. If he really had meant to give her a passing reminder that marriage with Kitty would be a step down the social grade for him, he was thoroughly scared out of his intention. As he talked, reiterating the same thing again and again, the heat rose into his neatly-shaved face and little aquiline nose.

Mrs. Guinness observed his agitation with calm triumph. She knew but one ladder into heaven, and that, short and narrow, was through her own Church. Kitty was stepping up on a high rung of it. Once the wife of this good Christian man, and her soul was safe. A sudden vision of her flitted before her mother in grave but rich attire (fawn-colored velvet, for instance, for next winter, trimmed with brown fur), to suit her place as the wife of the wealthy Muller, head of the congregation and the Reformatory school: she would be instant, too, at prayer—meetings and Dorcas societies. This was Mrs. Guinness's world, and she reasoned according to the laws of it. She rejoiced as Hannah did when she had safely placed her child within the temple of the Lord.

And yet with that hint of the social position of the Mullers had come the certainty to her that this marriage could never be. A shadow had stood suddenly before her—a boy's face, the only one before which her calm, complacent soul had ever quailed or shrunk. The pleasant, apple-cheeked woman, like the rest of us, had her ghost—her sin unwhipped of justice. She stood calmly as Mr. Muller hurried his explanations, piling them one on top of the other, but she did not hear a word of them. If he should ever hear Hugh's story! Dead though he was, if that were known not a beggar in the street would marry Catharine.

But since Fanny Guinness was an amiable, pink-cheeked belle in the village choir, she had never turned her back on an enemy: why should she now? Hugh Guinness had hated her as the vicious always hate the good, but she was thankful she had smiled and greeted him with Christian forbearance to the very last. As for this danger coming from him, now that he was dead, the safest way was to drag it to the light at once. All things worked together for good to those who loved the Lord—if you managed them right.

"Of course," she said, as if just finishing a sentence, "you are indifferent to social rank. And yet it will be no slight advantage to you that Catharine has no swarm of needy kinsfolk. Her own father died when she was a baby. Mr. Guinness is the only near friend she has ever known except myself. He had a son when I married him—" The boy's name stuck in her throat. For a moment she felt as the murderer does, forced to touch his victim with his naked hand. "Hugh—Hugh Guinness—was the lad's name."

"I never heard of him," indifferently.

"No, it is not probable you should. Long before Berrytown was built he  went to Nicaragua. He died there. Well," with a little wave of the hand, "there you have Kitty's whole family. It will be better that she should be so untrammeled, for the interests of the school."

"The school? I'm not a Reformatory machine altogether, I suppose!" He had been watching Catharine, who was moving about in the shop. When he was not in sight of her he always remembered that she was a mere child, to be instructed from the very rudiments up after marriage, and that the Guinnesses were ten degrees, at least, below him in the social scale. But she was near—she was coming! The complacent smile went out of his trig little features: he moved his tongue about to moisten his dry lips before he could speak. He was absolutely frightened at himself. "There's more than the school to be thought of, Mrs. Guinness," he blurted out. "I—I love Catharine. And I want this matter settled. Immediately—within the hour."

"Very well. You will be satisfied with the result, I am sure, Mr. Muller. I give Catharine to you with all my heart." But she did not look any more at ease than he. They both turned to look at Kitty, who came toward them in her usual headlong gait through the shop.

III

Her mother scanned Catharine when she came in as she had never done before. She was "taking stock" of her, so to speak: she wished to know what was in the girl to have secured this lover, or what there was to hold him should he ever hear Hugh's damning story. Her eye ran over her. She was able to hold her motherly fondness aside while she judged her. Kitty was flushed and awakened from head to foot with the excitement of this single visitor.

"At her age," thought Mrs. Guinness, "I could have faced a regiment of lovers. Kitty's weak: I always felt her brain was small—small. She has nothing of my face, or address either. There's no beauty there but youth, and her curious eyes." She never had been sure whether she admired Kitty's eyes or not.

But clergymen and reformers were as vulnerable as other men to soft, flushing cheeks and moist lips, and Mr. Muller, as she judged from his agitation, was no wiser than the rest. He pressed nervously forward, bridging his nose with his eye-glasses.

"Catharine, my child, will you walk out with me? I wish to consult you on a little matter."

"Oh, with pleasure," said Kitty.

Her mother stood aghast. Like the mass of women, she viewed the matter of love from the sentimental, L.E.L. stand-point. It had been a forbidden subject to Kitty. Her heart her mother supposed, slept, like the summer dawn, full of dreams, passion, dewy tenderness, waiting for the touch of the coming day. What kind of awakening would the plump "Will you marry me?" of this fat little clergyman be? In the street of Berry town, too! in the middle of the afternoon! If it were only moonlight!

"Pray wait until evening, Catharine: you're always famished for your supper," she cried anxiously.

"But I'm not hungry now at all," running up the stairs. For politeness' sake Kitty would lie with a smile on her mouth though a fox were gnawing at her stomach. Something in her running reminded Mr. Muller that she was a school-girl and he a middle-aged noted reformer. He fidgeted about the room, looking at the prints of La Fayette and Franklin on the whitewashed wall, and the Tomb of Washington done in faded chenilles by Mr. Guinness's first wife, buttoning his gloves with an anxious frown.

"I'm sure I don't know what my sister Maria will say to this," after one or two uneasy laughs. "I never mean to be eccentric, yet somehow I always am different from anybody else. Now, in church-matters—I never intended to leave the orthodox communion, yet when I showed how my Church was clinging to worn-out dogmas, and opened my Reformatory in Berrytown, the  Free-Religionists in Boston seized me, and printed my opening sermon under one cover with that of an Oneidaite and a Spiritualist. Do I look like a medium or a Free-Lover? That was going a little too far, I take it."

"Ah?" came Mrs. Guinness's calm interrogatory. No more.

William Muller was a man of culture and a certain force in one direction, and when pleading the cause of the vicious children to whom he was giving his life could hold men of real mental strength attentive and subdued. He did not know why, when this commonplace little woman had her steady eye on him, he should always dribble out all his weakness to her. But he did it—talked on in a leaky way of his squabble with his church and the praises he had received in newspapers for his school, until he heard Kitty's step on the stairs.

"Ah! there she is!" he cried relieved.

Catharine came back, close buttoned in a brown dress, with high-laced boots, and a light stick in her hand. She used to call it her alpenstock, and make all Switzerland out of the New Jersey sands with it. She ran in to kiss her father good-bye, blushing and delighted. It was the first time she had ever walked with any man but himself. "Here's an adventure!" she whispered. Every day she and Peter expected an adventure before night. She drew back startled at the strange, uneasy look he gave her. Her mother, too, pulled her hastily away, and walked beside her to the gate.

"Child," she whispered breathlessly, "he is your lover."

"Lover?" said Kitty aloud. "Lover?" But Mr. Muller joined her at the moment, and opening the gate motioned for her to precede him. They went down the quiet street together.

Mrs. Guinness went back and watched them from the shop-window. "It is as I thought," she said triumphantly.

Peter nodded. She came behind him, leaning on his shoulder. "It was only proper for me to speak to him of—of—" It was fifteen years since Hugh's name had passed between them.

"Whatever was necessary to protect you and Catharine," he said quietly. She pressed her hands on his forehead beneath his wig, and presently he drew one of them down and held it to his lips, thinking how forbearing she had been with his boy. Mrs. Guinness went up stairs then and knelt down by the bed. She was rather fond of the exercise which she called praying—taking a larger image of herself into her confidence. Her one idea of Him was that He could provide comfortably here and elsewhere for herself and Catharine. But to-day her conscience irritated her like a nettle. Could it be that she was at soul tricky? Could God hold her, rigorous church-member, fond wife and mother as she was, guilty of this boy's blood? Nettles, however, do not sting very deeply. She rose presently, unfolded her work, and sat sewing and singing a hymn, a complacent smile on her good-humored face.

Down in the shop Peter had taken out the violin again, and was playing some nameless old air, into the two or three monotonous notes of which had crept an infinite stillness and longing. He often played it, but only when he was alone, for he would not allow Kitty to hear any but merry, vivacious music.

IV

Meanwhile, Catharine and Mr. Muller walked down the street in absolute silence, Kitty bearing herself with her usual grave politeness, though there was a quizzical laugh in her eyes. "Lover? My lover?" she thought. But she did not blush, as some other innocent girls would have done. She had never talked an hour in her life to a young man, or heard from other girls their incessant chirping of "he—he," like that of birds in spring wooing their mates. Her nearest acquaintance with lovers was old Peter's rendering of Romeo or Othello. She remembered them well enough as her eye furtively ran over the jaunty little figure beside her. "Is his hose ungartered, his beard neglected, his shoe untied?" she thought. "Pshaw! he is  not Orlando, any more than I am Rosalind." Her mother had been mistaken, that was all: she let the matter slip easily past her. There was a certain tough common sense in Catharine that summarily sent mistakes and sentimental fancies to the right about.

Mr. Muller, finding the words he wished to speak would not come at once, and ashamed of jogging on in silence, began to overflow with the ordinary ideas of which he was full. They passed the grape-packing house. "Eight thousand boxes despatched last season, Catharine! And there is the Freedmen's Agency. Three teachers supported, five hundred primers furnished to Virginia alone since January, and I really forget the number of Bibles. But the world moves: yes indeed. And I think sometimes Berrytown moves in the van."

"I've no doubt of that," said Kitty politely. "Dear me! Five hundred spelling-books!" But she felt humiliated. She had neither picked grapes nor taught freedmen. What thin wisps of hair these women had stopping to speak to Mr. Muller! She put her hand suddenly to the back of her head.

"Those are employees in the canning-house," he said as they passed on. "One is educating herself as a short-hand reporter, and the other has a lecture ready for next winter on Shakespeare's Women."

"What admirable persons they must be! Ah! now I have it right!" setting her hat higher on the light chestnut coils. Mr. Muller looked, and his eye rested there. She knew that, though the back of her head was toward him. But lover? Nonsense! He meant no doubt to propose that she should go into the typesetting business or stenography.

Now, to tell Kitty's secret, she had had her love-affair her mother knew nothing about, which made her purblind in this matter. It was this: There was a certain cave (originally a spring-house) behind the walnut trees, quite covered over with trumpet-vines and partridge-berries. She had a bench there, from which she could see only the shady old house and the sun going down. When she was a child of about eight, alone all day long, year in and out, she had taken down this bench, and working stealthily and blushing terribly, had made it large enough for two. She never allowed anybody, not even Peter, dearest of all, to come into the cave or sit on the bench afterward. What her childish fancy of an unknown friend was, or how it grew and altered with her years, only she knew, though after she was grown she told her father of a certain Sir Guy in some of his crusading stories in whom she had believed as a fact. "I actually thought he would come to woo me," she said laughing, "and I had a castle where I sat and waited for him. There never was a child so full of absurd fancies."

But she never said where the castle was, and she was fond still of sitting alone for hours on the old bench, over which the shade grew heavier year by year, and the moonlight crept with more mysterious glitter. She came in sometimes when she had been there in the evening, and the sound of old Peter's violin alone broke the silence, with her cheeks feverish, as though there had been an actual presence with her to share her secret thoughts. The only living being she had ever taken into her hiding-place was, oddly enough, a baby of whom she was fond. It happened to fall asleep in her arms one day, and Catharine stole out with it and sat on the old seat, feeling its warm breath on her breast. The girl was shaken by an emotion which she did not understand: her blood grew hot, her breath came and went, she stroked the baby's hand and foot, kissed it, glanced about her with eyes guilty yet pure.

But it is certain Kitty had no thought of her cave this afternoon. Mr. Muller and his affairs were quite another matter. There was an awkward silence. Mr. Muller was collecting his forces: he cleared his throat. "Catharine—" he said.

"Ah, William!" cried a clear, well-toned voice behind them. He turned, half annoyed and half relieved, to meet a young lady in gray, stepping alertly  from the doorway of the Water-cure House.

"Maria? This is my sister Maria, Miss Vogdes."

The lady looked at Kitty—a steady, straightforward look—then held out her hand. It was a large, warm, hearty hand, and gripped yours like a man's. Kitty took it, but felt like shirking the eyes. She had no mind to be so weighed and measured. She had an uncomfortable consciousness that her inner nature was all bared and sorted by this agreeable young woman in this first moment to the last odd and end in it, though she could not have put the consciousness into words.

"Going to the school, William? I am."

"Well—yes, we will go there." He turned irresolutely, and they walked together down the plank pathway, Kitty with an oppressive sense of having fallen into the clutch of one of the Primal Forces, who was about to settle her destiny for her; in which she stumbled almost on the truth. Miss Muller was quite aware of the fact of her brother's visits at the book-shop, and their motive. She glanced at her watch: she could give herself half an hour to find out what stuff was in the girl, though it hardly needed so long. "A good type of the Domestic Woman in the raw state," she thought. (She always jotted down her thoughts sharply to herself, as a busy shopkeeper makes entries in his day-book.) "Pulpy, kissable. A vine to which poor William would appear an oak. A devoted wife, and, if he died, a gay widow, ready to be a fond wife to somebody else."

"What do you mean to make of yourself, Miss Vogdes?" she snapped suddenly, just as Kitty was counting the hen-coops of the society in the field they were passing, and wondering how she could contrive to get a pair of their Cochin Chinas.

"To make?" stammered Kitty ("I knew she would take me by the throat somehow," she thought)—"of myself?—Why, I am Peter Guinness's daughter."

"You poor child!" Miss Muller laughed. It was a very merry, infectious laugh. She laid her hand on Kitty's shoulder gently, as though she had been a helpless kitten. "Now you see how our social system works, William. Ask a boy that question, and his answer comes pat—a doctor, carpenter, what not. In any case, he has a career, an independent soul and identity. This poor girl is—Peter Guinness's daughter, is content to be that. Though perhaps," turning sharply on her, "she thinks of the day when she will be the wife of somebody, the mother of children. Those, two ideas are enough to fill the brains of most women."

Mr. Muller colored, and smiled significantly to himself. Catharine looked at her with a grave suspense, but made no answer.

"Yes," Miss Muller went on, a certain heat coming into her delicate face, "that contents the most of them—to be the fool or slave of a lover or a husband or son. 'The perfume and suppliance of a minute—no more but that.'"

She walked on in silence after this, and Catharine scanned her quietly. She was not at all the mad woman Mrs. Guinness had always described her—not at all what Kitty had fancied a lecturer on woman suffrage, a manager of the Water-cure and a skillful operating surgeon must be. She was little, pretty, frail, with a very genuine look and voice—almost as young as Kitty, and far more tastefully dressed. Catharine eyed her wonderful coiffure with envy, and was quite sure those rosy-tipped, well-kept fingers never had anything to do with cutting up dead babies.

Mr. Muller at the moment was comparing the two girls critically. The point on which he dwelt longest was that his sister's eyes, fine, limpid and brown, were those of an actress, acting to herself very probably. They went through the whole imperative mood—exhorted, commanded, entreated in five minutes: even a certain woeful sadness which came into them at times, and was there now, was quite bare and ready to be seen of all men.

"She is always on review before  herself: she is conscious of herself from head to foot," he thought with shrewdness only born out of long knowledge. "Her very toes, I've no doubt, say to each other, 'I, Maria.'"

As for his future wife, her eyes were given her to see with, nothing more. "And she looks out with them, never in," he reflected complacently. For he had come by this time to regard her as his future wife. It seemed quite natural when Maria presently took Kitty in hand as one of the family, and began to manage for her as she did for them all, from Grandfather Hicks down to the dog Tar.

"I think, William, Miss Vogdes has the maternal instinct largely developed," looking at her face and the shape of her head as a naturalist would at a new bug. "You could find work for her in here," unlatching the gate of the Reformatory school. "She could serve humanity here just as well as if she had more—more—well, we'll say stamina."

"Precisely what I thought of," cheerfully. "You've hit the nail on the head about her, Maria." He was a peaceable, affectionate fellow at bottom. He had never hoped that his sister would tolerate Kitty, and women's squabbles in a family he abhorred, like every other man; and here she was extending a hospitable greeting, finding work for Kitty already. Io triumphe!

"Suppose you show Miss Vogdes the institution, sister?" he said, rubbing his eye-glasses and putting them on again in a flutter of pleasure and cordiality.

Miss Muller nodded authoritatively, and he fell into the background.

"You'll observe, Miss Vogdes," with a laugh and shrug, "Berrytown has given its best of æsthetic instincts here: five square stories painted white, with green shutters; pebble walks; six straight evergreens to testify of the Beautiful. Inside—here we are! Parlor: yellow-pine floors, spotless; green paper blinds in the windows, that hang stirless the year round. This is the kitchen: white boards, shining caldrons. William, show the soup."

Mr. Muller gravely held up a ladleful: "Beef and cabbage. To each child we allow per diem three parts of animal food, three purely farinaceous, four vegetable. The proper scale, I hold, of healthful nourishment," putting back the ladle. He had not spilled a drop.

"Dining-room," continued Miss Muller: "more white boards; shining tin plates; these three hundred little figures in blue jeans ranged against the wall are the—the patients. Now observe." Mr. Muller rapped once, they raised their hands; twice, they clasped them; three times, they rattled off the Lord's Prayer; the next moment they were shoveling their soup into their mouths in silence.

"Miss Vogdes does not approve their religious teaching, William. You see," turning to her, "how they need a real motherly care. You could give it to them."

But Kitty, who perhaps did "want stamina," and who was more of a child than any before her, made no answer. Vice and disease faced her as never before: those hundreds of hungry eyes fenced her in.

"Are you sick?" said Mr. Muller anxiously, seeing her face. "It is the smell of the soup, perhaps. Come out of this. Let me pass, Maria. You forget how foolishly tender her life has been: she never probably looked at crime before. Come out to the fresh air."

"You'd better stay," said Maria coolly, aside. "These children will plead your cause with such a girl as that better than you can do or have done, I take it. Now, my dear," putting Kitty's hand between her own, "this is my brother's work, in which he wishes you to join him. Put it to yourself whether it is not your duty. You're very young; you've dreamed a good deal, most likely: this wakening to the fact that there is work in the world besides marrying and nursing babies revolts and shocks most young girls. Yet here it is." Her voice was very gentle, and sincere in every cadence, the words true: there lay the terrible grinding power of them. "Talk over your future life with William, my dear. There is the matron. I must go and see about that charge for pepper she  made last month. Pepper for these children's stomachs, indeed!"

Mr. Muller drew Catharine's hand in his arm. "I did not mean to bring you here to-day," he said, nervously mopping his face with his handkerchief. "Maria is so fond of managing! But—but it was as my wife I wanted your help."

"My wife." Kitty was not surprised. At eighteen one reasons as the bird flies. Since she passed the six straight evergreens yonder she had learned that life was not an old book-house, a few sad and merry tunes, meals, and a bench to dream on. It was work—for Christ. Not far-off pagans, but little children with sin and disease heavy upon them, asking her to take it away.

She might want stamina or any other intellectual power, but her emotions were hot and near the surface: these children and their misery wounded and bruised her as they had never done Mr. Muller or his sister: her sense of duty and affection for her God, too, was as real and urgent with her as that of a dog for his master.

"Take me home now," she said quietly.

"But, Catharine—This is no answer. And my love for you is of such long standing!" pleaded the little man, whose mouth, being once opened by his passion, found it difficult to close. He forgot, too, the hundreds of eyes staring at him over the soup-spoons.

"Shall we go out?" said Kitty with an impatient laugh, which would not be polite. "There's too much beef here. And cabbage."

They passed Miss Muller, who nodded down on Catharine from the heights of brusque sincerity of the Woman's Rights people: "Come and see me, my dear. You and I shall get on very comfortably, I dare say;" to which Kitty replied with her old-fashioned manner, which had a fine courteous quality in it, whether it meant anything or not.

They were out in the street again. The sun was still hot and glaring. Past the new row of Morse's blue-painted shops, down the factory alley, all along the cinder path, Mr. Muller pressed and urged his suit. She heard every word with sharp distinctness.

The children: her work for Christ. Under all was a dull consciousness that this thing had been coming on her since the day, years ago, when she had suffered conviction at a revival and been converted. All His followers must give their lives to His service. Give their lives! These were words which to the poor little girl had always been terribly real, never a hackneyed form. Now the time had come, there was a dreadful wrenching at her heart.

"Oh, God! oh, my God! I want to do what's right!" cried Kitty silently, looking away to the farthest horizon.

Mr. Muller remembered by this time some of his long-planned endearing speeches, and used them. But he could not bring a blush to her cheek. She did presently look straight at him, her eye passing quickly and critically over the neat paunchy little figure in its fashionably-cut coat and tight-fitting trowsers. When she was a girl of ten she had fancied that Dr. Brownlee would be her future husband—the actual Sir Guy. She would listen Sunday after Sunday to the gray-bearded old fellow dealing the thunders of Sinai from the pulpit overhead, in a rapt delight, thinking how sweet it would be to be guided step by step by so holy and great a man. Long after she grew out of that, indeed only a year or two ago, she used to tremble and grow hot to her finger-tips when young Herr Bluhm, the music-master, went by the gate. A nod of his curly bullet head or the tramp of his sturdy cowskin boots along the road made her nerves tingle as never before. "What was this that ailed her?" she had asked herself a dozen times a day. All Mr. Muller's love-making did not move her now as one note of Bluhm's voluntaries on the organ had done. She had thought him Mendelssohn and Mozart in one: the tears came now, thinking of that divine music. But one day Mrs. Guinness had brought him in, being a phrenologist, to "feel Kitty's head." She felt the astonished indignation yet which stunned her from his thick thumb and  fore finger as they gripped and fumbled over her head as if she had been a log of wood. But what could poor Bluhm know of the delicate fancies about himself in her brain as he measured it, which his heavy paws, smelling of garlic and tobacco, were putting to flight? "Philoprogenitiveness—whew! this little girl will be fond of children, madam. Tune, time!—has no more notion of music than a frog."

"At least," thought Catharine now, "Mr. Muller is a gentleman. I shall never feel disgust for him."

They had reached the gate now. He waited. "I shall not come in. I've confused and startled you, Catharine. You want time to think," he said gently.

"I understand, oh, I quite understand. But I never thought of myself as your wife," she said quietly. "It would be better you gave me time."

"Good-bye, then, my—my darling."

"Good-bye."

She stood looking over the gate, the walnut branches dark overhead, a level ray of sunlight on her strange alluring eyes and full bosom. Mr. Muller lingered, smoothing his hat before he put it on.

"She has not at all the intellectual power of Maria," he thought. "Maria's the sort of woman I ought to have chosen, I suppose," being a reformer, first of all, in the very grain. But the silly thought of holding her hand or kissing her lips came to him at the moment, and tormented him thereafter with a feverish desire.

V

Catharine stood a long time by the gate.

"Don't question the child," said Peter to her mother. He would not even look at her when she came in, but fidgeted about, his leathery jaws red as a girl's at the thought that Kitty loved and was beloved.

"Is supper over? I'm hungry," was all she said. They watched her furtively as she ate.

"It's prayer-meeting night, Catharine," said Mrs. Guinness when she was through, taking her bonnet from the closet.

"I'm not going."

"Mr. Muller will miss you, my dear."

"Mr. Muller never has enough of prayer-meetings," recklessly, "but I have. I prefer going to bed to-night;" and she went up stairs.

Before her mother was gone, however, she began to change her dress, putting on one which, when the cape was not worn, left her shoulders and arms bare. She shook down her hair after the fashion of a portrait in the book-shop of Kitty Clive, Peg Woffington or some other ancient beauty more amiable than discreet. There was a delicious flavor of wickedness in the taking out of every hairpin. Then she came down to Peter where he sat smoking.

"In the dark, father? I'll light the candles;" which she did, scolding Jane savagely between-times. "We'll have some old plays to-night, father," bringing a book which her mother had forbidden, and then bringing his sheepskin-lined chair up to the table. Peter eyed her furtively as he puffed out his cigar to the last ash. On the stage or in the ball-room he had never seen, he thought, a finer woman than Catharine; and the old man's taste in beauty or dress or wine had been keen enough when he was a young blood on the town. He was annoyed and irritable.

"Catharine," he said sharply "bring your shawl: the night is chilly." But he read the plays with outward good-humor, and with an inward delight and gusto, which he would not betray. All his youth—that old Peter Guinness, for whom each day's bumpers had been frothed so high—came back in the familiar exits and entrances. The words were innocent enough as he altered them in reading for Kitty, though a good deal disjointed as to meaning; but she was not critical—forced herself to take an interest in his stories of Burton and Kean, and how he first saw old Jefferson.

"I suppose," moving uneasily on her stool at his feet, "that this now is 'the world, the flesh and the devil!' But,"  viciously snapping her eyes, "I like it, I like it! I wish I could think of something else to do."

In the middle of Peter's croaking of "Poor Yarico," to show her how Catalani sang it on the London boards, she jumped up and went to the window. People were coming home from prayer-meeting, husbands and wives together.

"I suppose every woman must marry, father?" she said.

Peter looked doubtfully at her over his spectacles, opened his mouth and shut it once or twice. "I judge that is the highest lot for a woman," he said slowly, "to be the wife of a good man."

"A good man? Oh yes, good enough!" and with that she flung herself down on the floor, and, putting her head on Peter's knee, cried as if her heart would break. For Kitty was never in the habit of carrying her pain off into solitary places: when she cried it must be with her head on somebody's knee.

This chapter of Catharine's history every wide-awake young woman among our readers has doubtless finished for herself: she knows the closing-in process by which society, expediency, propinquity, even moral obligations, hedge many a man and woman and drive them into marriage.

In the weeks that followed she saw but one path open to her: in it lay her work for Christ and her woman's birthright to be a wife and mother (for Kitty, ever since she was a baby nursing dolls, had meant to be both).

She spent most of her time shut up with her Bible and hymn-book, sometimes praying over them, sometimes sticking in her forefinger and opening at chance verses to try her fortune about this affair. During this time she was usually unnaturally humble and meek, but there were days when her temper was intolerable.

"Don't come complaining to me," said Peter testily to her mother. "The child's a good child enough. But when you force her to stretch her heart over three hundred vicious little imps, no wonder it breaks."

"Kitty's a free agent," she replied calmly.

Kitty was a free agent, and at the end of two weeks she accepted Mr. Muller.

REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.