BERRYTOWN.

CHAPTER VIII.

It rained during the night. The wind blew feebly in the morning, and the sunlight glimmered dully from behind the flying gray clouds. Catharine looked out of her window, anxiously pushing aside the boughs full of wet white roses. The sense of desolation was not strong enough upon her to make her forget that Peter had not yet cut the clover in the lower meadow, and that such a rain was bad for the tomatoes. Doctor McCall was at the gate, propping up an old Bourbon rose, an especial favorite of her father's. Somebody tapped at her door, and Miss Muller rustled in in a flounced white muslin and rose-colored ribbons. She too hurried to the window and looked down.

"I asked him to meet me here, Kitty. I can't make you understand, probably, but the Water-cure House is so bald and bare! There is something in the shade here, and the old books, and this wilderness of roses, that forms a fitting background for a friendship like ours, aesthetically considered."

"I'm very glad. It's lucky I told Jane to have waffles—"

"I'll go down," interrupted Miss Muller, "and direct her about the table. Coarse tablecloths and oily butter would jar against the finest emotions. What very pretty shoulders you have, child! Such women as you, like potatoes, are best au naturel. Now, with those corsets, and this red shawl over the back of your chair, you would make a very good Madonna of the Rubens school. Men's ideal of womanhood then was to be plump, insipid and a mother."

"But about the oily butter?" said Kitty, glancing back over the aforesaid shoulders as she stooped to lace her shoes, while Maria hurried off to the kitchen. "Jane will jar against her finer emotions, I fancy, when she begins to order her about."

But Kitty lost all relish for fun before she sat down to the breakfast-table. Mr. Muller came in. The poor little man hurried to her side: "I passed a sleepless night, Catharine. I feared that I had been rough with you. I forget so often how gentle and tender you are, my darling."

Catharine was puzzled: "Upon my word, I've forgotten what happened. And I really never feel especially gentle or tender. You are mistaken about that."

When she took her place behind the urn, Maria motioned her brother to the foot of the table, and then nodded significantly. "Now you two can imagine a month or two has passed," she said.

Even Doctor McCall smiled meaningly. Mr. Muller blushed, and glanced shyly at Catharine. But she looked at him unmoved. "Our table will not be like this," gravely. "You forget the three hundred blue-coats between." Maria laughed, but Doctor McCall for the first time looked steadily at the girl.

First of all, perhaps, Kitty was just then a housekeeper. She waited anxiously to see if the steak was properly rare and the omelette light, nodded brightly to Jane, who stood watchful behind her, and then looked over at her betrothed, thinking how soon they would sit down tête-à-tête for the rest of their lives, perhaps for eternity, for, according to her orthodoxy, there could be no new loves in heaven. How fat he was, and bald! The mild blue eyes behind their glasses took possession of her and held her.

She listened to the talk between Doctor McCall and Miss Muller in a language she had never learned. Maria's share of it was largely made up of headlong dives into Spencer and Darwin, with reminiscences of The Dial, while Doctor McCall's was anchored fast down to facts; but it was all alive, suggestive, brilliant. They were young. They were drinking life and love with full cups.  She (looking over at the bald head and spectacled eyes) had gone straight out of childhood into middle age and respectability.

The breakfast was over at last. Miss Muller followed Doctor McCall into the shop, where he fell to turning over the old books, and then to the garden. What was the use of a stage properly set if the drama would not begin?

"Pray do not worry any longer with that old bush," as he went back to Peter's rose. "It is not a trait of yours to be persistent about trifles. Or stay: give me a bud for my hair."

"Not these!" sharply, holding her hand. "I could not see one of these roses on any woman's head."

She smiled, very well pleased: "You perceive some subtle connection between me and the flower?"

"Nothing of the sort. There are some, planted, I suppose, by that little girl, which will be more becoming to your face."

"You are repelled by 'the little girl,' I see, John. I always told you your instincts were magnetic. That type of woman is antipathetic to you."

He laughed: "I have no instincts, hardly ideas, about either roses or types of women. If I avoided Miss Vogdes, it was because her name recalled one of the old hard experiences of my boyhood. The girl herself is harmless enough, no doubt."

"And the rose?"

"The rose? Why, we have no time to waste in such talk as this. You have not yet told me how you managed to get your profession. When I last saw you you had set all the old professors in the university at defiance. Did you carry lectures and cliniques by strategy or assault? You have good fighting qualities, Maria."

She would rather not have gone over her battle with the doctors just then: she would rather he had talked of her "magnetic instincts," her hair, her eyes—anything else than her fighting qualities. But she told him. There was an inexplicable delight to her in telling him anything—even the time of day. Was he not a pioneer, a captain among men, a seer in the realms of thought, keeping step with her in all her high imaginings? Ordinary people, it is true, set McCall down as an ordinary fellow, genial and hearty—not a very skillful physician, perhaps, but a shrewd farmer, and the best judge of mules or peaches in Kent county. Maria, however, saw him with the soul's eye.

Kitty meanwhile sat by the window mending the clothes that had come out of the wash. Mr. Muller was reading some letters relative to the school to her. This was the day of the week on which she always mended the clothes, and Mr. Muller had fallen into the habit of reading to her while she did so. But to-day the Reformatory rose before her a prison, the gates of which were about to close on her. The heap of stockings, the touch of the darning cotton, the sound of Mr. Muller's droning voice, were maddening to her: every moment she made a tangle in her thread, looking down at Maria under the Bourbon rose, and the attentive face bent over her. Where should she go? What should she do? Had the world nothing in it for her but this? Yesterday she had made up her mind to go to Delaware to find Hugh Guinness, alive or dead, and bring him to his father. That would be work worth doing. This morning she remembered that Delaware was a wide hunting-ground—that she had never been ten miles from home in her life. If there were anybody to give her advice! This Doctor McCall had seemed to her to-day as, in fact, he did to most people, practical, honest, full of information. He would too, she somehow felt, understand her wild fancy. But—

"Why should Doctor McCall dislike me?" she broke in at the close of one of Mr. Muller's expositions.

"What an absurd fancy, child!" looking up in amazement. "The man was civil enough to you for so slight an acquaintance."

"It was more than dislike," vehemently. "He watched me all through breakfast as though he owed me a grudge. I could see it in his eyes."

"You oughtn't to see any eyes but mine, Cathie dear," with anxious playfulness. "Why should you care for the opinion of any man?"

"Because he is different from any man I ever knew. He belongs to the world outside. I always did wonder if people would like me out there," said Kitty, too doggedly in earnest to see how her words hurt her listener. "If one could be like those two people yonder! They seem to know everything—they can do everything!"

"Maria is well enough—for a woman," dryly. "But I never heard McCall credited with exceptional ability of any sort."

Kitty glanced at him: "Of course you're right," quickly. "Men only can judge of character: we women are apt to be silly about such things." Her kind heart felt a wrench at having hurt this good soul. She put her fingers on his fat hand with a touch that was almost a caress. He turned red with surprise and pleasure. "But it is pleasant," she said, glancing down again to the Bourbon rose, "to see such love as that. They will be married soon, I suppose?"

"Very likely. I never knew of any love in the case before. But Maria is such a manager! And you think of love, then, sometimes?" timidly putting his arm about her.

"Oh to be sure! How can you doubt that? But it grows chilly. I must bring a sacque," hurrying away; and in fact she looked cold, and shivered.

CHAPTER IX.

"Doctor McCall recognizes the Book-house, just as I did, as the right background for communion like ours," Miss Muller said complacently to Kitty a week later. "He meets me here every day."

"Yes," said Catharine with a perplexed look. She had no special instincts or intuitions, but her eyes were as keen and observant as a lynx's. He came, she saw, to the Book-house every day. But had he no other purpose than to meet Maria?

"I did not know that McCall affected scholarship," said Mr. Muller tartly the next day. "He tells me that he has a peach-farm to manage. August is no time to loiter away, poring over old books. Just the peach season."

"No," Kitty replied demurely. But her face wore again the puzzled look. She began to watch Doctor McCall. He really knew but little, she saw, of rare books: his reading of them was a mere pretence. He was neither a lazy nor a morbid man: what pleasure could he have in neglecting his work day after day, sitting alone in the dusky old shop as if held there by some enchantment? Kitty knew that she herself had nothing to do with it: she appeared to be no more in his way than a tame dog would be, and, after the first annoyance which she gave him, was really little more noticed. But there is a certain sense of home-snugness and comfort in the presence of tame dogs and of women like Kitty: one cannot be long in the room with either without throwing them a kind word or petting them in some way. Doctor McCall was just the man to fall into such a habit. Down on the farm, his cattle, his hands, even the neighbors with whom he argued on politics, could all have testified to his easy, large good-humor.

"Oh, we are the best of friends," he said indifferently when Maria found Kitty chattering to him once, very much as she did to old Peter. But when Miss Muller, who had no petty jealousies, enlarged on the singular beauty of her eyes and some good points in her shape, he did not respond. "I never could talk of a woman as if she were a horse," he said. "And this little girl seems to me unusually human."

"There's really nothing in her, though. Poor William! He is marrying eyes, I tell him. It's a pitiable marriage!"

"Yes, it is," said Doctor McCall gravely.

After that he neglected the old books sometimes to talk to Kitty. He thought she was such an immature, thoughtless creature that she would not notice that the subject he chose was always the  same—her daily life, with old Peter for her chum and confidant.

"Mr. Guinness, then, has had no companion but you?" he said one day, after a searching inspection of her face.

"No, nobody but me," quite forgetful, as she and Peter were too apt to be, that her mother was alive.

"And has had none for years?"

"Not since his son died. Hugh Guinness is dead, you know."

Doctor McCall was looking thoughtfully at the floor. He rose presently and took up his hat: "The old man cannot have been unhappy with such love as you could give him. No man could."

Kitty was sitting, as usual, on a low stool pasting labels on some dog-eared books: as long as McCall stood looking at her round cheeks and double chin she pasted on, apparently unconscious that he was there, but when he turned away she watched him shrewdly as he went uneasily up and down the shop, and finally, with a curt good-bye, turned out of the door. As the stout figure passed through the low branches of the walnuts her gray eyes began to shine. Her Mystery was nearly solved.

Dropping paste and books in a heap, she ran after him, taking a short cut through the currant bushes, so that when he passed on the outer side of the garden fence there she was quietly waiting, her head and face darkly framed by a thick creeper.

"Well?" smiling down, amused, as he might to a playful kitten.

"Doctor McCall," in the queer formal fashion that was Kitty's own, "I should be glad if you would come back this evening. Without Maria. I have some business—that is, a plan of mine. Well, it is a certain thing that—"

"That you wish to consult me about?" after waiting for her to finish.

"Yes, that's it," nodding energetically.

"Very well." He stood looking at her arm on the fence, and the face resting with its chin upon it. McCall, of all men, hated a scene, and he had an uneasy consciousness that he had just betrayed unexplained feeling in the house, and was therefore glad to slip back to commonplaces. Besides, Kitty was exactly the kind of woman whom all men feel an insane desire to help at first sight. "You have a plan, eh? and you want advice, not knowing much about business?"

There was not the least necessity for him to say this, having asked it before. But he did it, and waited to hear Kitty say yes again, and waited still, before he lifted his hat and said good-bye, to see the shadow of a waving branch creep over her white chin and lose itself in her neck. Most men would have done the same, just as they would stop to whistle a laugh from a fat, pretty baby on the street, and then go on, leaving it behind. The last thing in the world to consult on their business, or to ask for help or comfort when trouble met them, or death.

Miss Muller spent the whole day at the Book-house, but Doctor McCall did not come, as she expected. As evening approached she began to shiver, and had premonitory symptoms of clairvoyance, and went home at last, to Kitty's relief. A slow drizzling rain set in: the damp fogs that belong to that river-bottom walled in the house and hung flat over the walnuts like a roof. Catharine had made her own corner of the Book-shop snug and cheerful. The space was wide, the light soft and bright. She placed her own chair by the table, Peter's not far from it. She meant to produce a great effect on this man to-night, to change the whole current of his life, without having the help of either love or even friendship. Unconsciously she planned to bring him close to her, though very likely she had never heard of personal magnetism, or any of the curious secrets political speakers or actors or revivalists could have told her of the deadening effects of distance and empty benches.

Then Kitty, in her room overhead, looked at herself in the glass, arrayed in a soft cashmere, in color blue, still farther toned down, by certain softer fringes and loops, into the very ideal garb for a man's type of "yielding, lovely  woman." It was one of the sacred wedding-dresses.

"Maria could never look like this," tying a lace handkerchief about her neck, pulling the soft rings of hair looser about her ears, setting her head on one side, and half shutting her eyes to see the thick and curly lashes.

There was no danger of interruption. Maria was safely lodged in the Water-cure House, and the very idea of Mr. Muller's glossy black shoes and dainty brown umbrella venturing out in the rain made Kitty laugh.

"The dear, good soul is finical as a cat," with the good-natured indulgence of a mother for a child. Suddenly she stopped, stared at herself in the glass. "Why, he is my husband!" she said, speaking to the blushing, blue-robed figure as to another person. Then she hastily unbuttoned, unlooped the pretty dress, threw it off, putting on her usual gray wrapper and knotting her hair more tightly back than ever in a comb. "He has been very good to me—very good to me," her chin trembling a good deal.

Then she went down to meet Doctor McCall, who that moment came into the Book-shop, stopping at the door to take off and shake his oilskin coat.

"It is a wet night," she said, just as though he were a stranger. She did not know what else to say or what he answered as she went about, trimming the lamp, dragging out a chair for him, closing the window curtains. Both McCall and Catharine were ordinary people, accustomed to keep up a good flow of talk on ordinary subjects, the weather or any joke or gossip that was nearest to them. There had been no passages of love or hate between them to account for her forced formality, her trembling and flushing, and urgent almost angry wish to remind him that she was Mr. Muller's affianced wife. She felt this with a new contempt for herself.

As for Doctor McCall, he leaned comfortably back in his arm-chair and dried his legs at the grate filled with red-hot coals, while he listened to the soft rustle of her skirts as she moved noiselessly about him. It is the peculiarity of women like Kitty, to whom Nature has denied the governing power of ideas or great personal beauty or magnetism, such as she gave to Miss Muller, that there is a certain impalpable force and attraction in their most petty actions and words, to which men yield. Miss Muller could have watched Kitty all day dragging chairs and trimming lamps, unmoved farther than to pronounce her little better than an idiot. But Peter, Muller or John McCall could not look at her for five minutes without classing her with Cordelia and Desdemona and all the other sweet fools for whom men have died, and whom the world yet keeps sacred in pathetic memory. Some day too, when Catharine should be a mother—though giving to her older children, little more than to the baby on her breast, soft touches and gentle words—she would bind them to her as no other kind, of mother could do—by such bonds that until they were gray-haired no power should be like hers. Miss Muller neither saw nor foresaw such things. But Doctor McCall did. "If I had had such a mother I should not have been what I am," he thought. It was a curious fancy to have about a young girl. But she seemed to embody all the womanliness that had been lacking in his life. Of course she was nothing to him. She was to be that prig Muller's wife, and he was quite satisfied that she should be. If he married, Maria Muller would be his wife. Yet, oddly enough, he felt to-night, for the first time, the necessity that Maria should know how marriage was barred out from him, and felt, for the first time, too, a maddening anger that it was so barred. However, Doctor McCall was never meant by Nature for a solitary man housed alone with morbid thoughts: he was the stuff out of which useful citizens are made—John Andersons of husbands, doting, gullible fathers.

Remembering the bar in his life, his skeleton, ghost or whatever it was, he was only moved to get up and stretch himself, saying, "I've stayed in Berrytown too long. When you have told me your plan, I'll say good-bye to you, Miss  Vogdes, and this old house. I shall be off to-morrow."

Kitty had just caught a moth in the flame of the candle. She carried it to the window. "You will come back soon, of course?" her back still toward him.

"No, I think not. I am neglecting my business. And I, of all men in the world, have least right to loiter about this old house, to look in on its home-life or on you."

Kitty gave him a sharp glance, as though some sudden emergency was clear before her which her tact failed to meet. She was folding the bits of muslin at which she had been sewing in a basket: she finished slowly, put the basket away, and sat down at the table, with her elbow on it and her chin on her hand, her gray eyes suggesting a deeper and unspoken meaning to her words: "But for my plan?"

"Ah! to be sure! You want advice?" seating himself comfortably. Her confusion was a pretty thing to watch, the red creeping up her neck into her face, blotting out its delicate tints, the uncertain glances, the full bitten lip. Doctor McCall quite forgot his own trouble in the keen pleasure of the sight.

"Perhaps—You do not quite understand my position here? Mr. Guinness is not my own father."

"No, I knew that."

"But you cannot know what he has been to me: I never knew until the last few days."

"Why within these few days, Miss Vogdes?"

"Because I saw you and Maria: I saw what love was. I began to think about it. I never have loved anybody but him," she went on headlong, utterly blind to all inferences. "There's a thing I can do for him, Doctor McCall, before I marry Mr. Muller, and I must do it. It will make his old age happier than any other part of his life has been."

McCall nodded, leaning forward. It was nothing but an imprudent girl dragging out her secrets before a stranger; nothing but a heated face, wet eyes, a sweet milky breath; but no tragedy he had ever seen on the stage had moved him so uncontrollably—no, not any crisis in his own life—with such delicious, inexplicable emotion.

"Well, what is it you can do?" after waiting for her to go on.

There was a moment's silence.

"My father," said Kitty, "had once a great trouble. It has made an old man of him before his time. I find that I can take it from him." She looked up at him with this. Now, there was a certain shrewd penetration under the softness of Kitty's eyes. Noting it, McCall instantly lost sight of her beauty and tears. He returned her look coolly.

"What was his trouble?"

"Mr. Guinness had a son. He has believed him to be dead for years: I know that he is not dead."

Doctor McCall waited, with her eyes still upon him. "Well?" he said, attentive.

"And then," pushing back the table and rising, "when I heard that, I meant to go and find Hugh Guinness, and bring him back to his father."

Whatever this matter might be to her hearer, it was the most real thing in life to Catharine, and putting it into words gave it a sudden new force. She felt that she ought to hold her tongue, but she could not. She only knew that the lighted room, the beating of the rain without, the watchful guarded face on the other side of the table, shook and frightened and angered her unaccountably.

"You should not laugh at me," she said. "This is the first work I ever set myself to do. It is better than nursing three hundred children."

"I am not laughing at you, God knows! But this Guinness, if he be alive, remains away voluntarily. There must be a reason for that. You do not consider."

"I do not care to consider. Is the man a log or a stone? If I found him," crossing the room in her heat until she stood beside him—"if I brought him to the old house and to his father? Why, look at this!" dragging open the drawer and taking out the broken gun and rod. "See what he has kept for years—all  that was left him of his boy! Look, at that single hair! If Hugh Guinness stood where you do, and touched these things as you are touching them, could he turn his back on the old man?"

Now, Doctor McCall did not touch gun nor cap nor hair, but he bent over the table, looking at them as if he were looking at the dead. He seemed to have forgotten that Kitty was there.

At last he stood upright: "Poor little chap!" with a laugh. "There seemed to be no reason, when he went gunning and fishing like other boys, why he should not stand here to-day with as fair a chance for happiness as any other man. Did there? Just a trifling block laid in his way, a push down hill, and no force could ever drag him up again."

Kitty, her eyes on his, stood silent. Do what he would, he could not shake off her eyes: they wrenched the truth from him, "I knew this man Guinness once," he said.

She nodded: "Yes, I know you did."

"Sit down beside me here, and I will tell you what kind of man he was."

But she did not sit down. An unaccountable terror or timidity seemed to have paralyzed her. She looked aside—everywhere but in his face: "I wanted you to tell me how to reach him, how to touch him: I know what manner of man he is."

"You have heard from your mother? A mixed Border Pike and Mephistopheles, eh? The devil and his victim rolled into one?" He shifted his heavy body uneasily, glancing toward the door. Chief among the graver secret emotions which she had roused in him was the momentary annoyance of not knowing how to deal with this chicken-hearted little girl before him, scared, but on fire from head to foot.

Kitty was quite confident. If it had been Maria Muller who had thus set herself to tamper with a man's life, she would have done it trembling, with fear and self-distrust. She had brains which could feel and react against the passions she evoked, and were competent to warn her of the peril of her work. But as for Kitty—

Here was Hugh Guinness before her, a Cain with the curse of God upon him. It was clearly her business to bring him back again to his father, and afterward convert him into a member of the church, if possible. She went about the work with as little doubt as if it had been the making of a pudding.

But she was shy, tender, womanly withal. Doctor McCall laughed as he looked down at her, and spoke deliberately, as though giving his opinion of a patient to another physician. "I'll tell you honestly my opinion of Hugh Guinness. He was, first of all, a thoroughly ordinary, commonplace man, with neither great virtues nor great vices, nor force of any kind. If he had had that, he could have recovered himself when he began to fall. But he did not recover himself."

"What drove him down in the first place?"

He hesitated: "I suppose that his home and religion became hateful to him. Boys have unreasonable prejudices at times."

"And then, in despair—"

"Despair? Nonsense! Now don't figure to yourself a romantic Hotspur of a fellow rushing into hell because heaven's gate was shut on him. At nineteen Hugh Guinness drank and fought and gambled, as other ill-managed boys do to work off the rank fever of blood. Unfortunately—" he stopped, and then added in a lower voice, quickly, "he made a mistake while the fever was on him which was irretrievable."

"A mistake?" Kitty was always of an inquiring turn of mind, but now she felt as if her curiosity was more than she could bear, while she stood, her eyes passing over the burly figure in summer clothes and the high-featured, pleasant face with its close-cut moustache. What dreadful secret was hid behind this good-humored, every-day propriety of linen duck, friendly eyes and reddish moustache over a mouth that often smiled? You might meet their like any day upon the streets. Was it a murder? At best some crime, perhaps, which had sent him to the penitentiary. Or—and church  taught Kitty shuddered as a vague remembrance of the "unpardonable sin" rose before her like an actual horror. Whatever it was, it stood between herself and him, keeping them apart for ever.

"Irretrievable?" she said. It was only curiosity, she knew, but her voice sounded oddly far off to herself, the room was hazy, her whole body seemed to shrink together.

"What can it matter to you? You belong to another man, Miss Vogdes." She lifted herself erect. Doctor McCall was speaking more loudly than usual and looking keenly into her face.

"I know: I shall be Mr. Muller's wife. Of course, I recollect. But you—this Hugh Guinness is my father's son," stammered Kitty, her face very white. "I had some interest in him."

"Yes, that's true. He is, as you say, in some sort a brother of yours." He took her hand for the first time, looking down at her face with some meaning in his own, inexplicable, very likely, to himself, though the thoughts in Kitty's shallow brain were clear enough to him. "You are tired of standing," seating her gently in Peter's chair. A thick lock of hair had fallen over her face: he put out his hand to remove it, but drew back quickly. "We have talked too long, Miss Vogdes," in a brisk, cheerful tone. "Some other time, perhaps, we can return to this question of Hugh Guinness. That is," with a certain significance of manner, "if it be one in which Mr. Muller wishes you to take an interest." Nodding good-humoredly to her, he buttoned on his oilskin cape and went out into the rain without another word. He pulled off his cap outside to let the rain and wind reach his head, drawing a long breath as if to get rid of some foul air and heat.

CHAPTER X.

Of all that wet August the next morning was the freshest and cheerfulest. Doctor McCall had packed his valise, carried it to the station, and was now walking up the street, his hands clasped behind him and his head down, after the leisurely fashion of Delaware and Jersey farmers. People nodded an approving good-morning to him. Busy Berrytown had passed verdict on him as a man who was idle for a purpose, who permitted his brain to lie fallow, and who "loafed and invited his soul" during these two weeks for the best spiritual hygienic reasons.

"Too much brain-work, my friend Doctor Maria Muller tells me," said the lawyer, De Camp, to a group of men at the station as McCall passed them. "Is here for repose."

"Advanced?" said little Herr Bluhm, the phrenologist.

"Well, no. But Doctor Maria thinks his mind is open to conviction, and that he would prove a strong worker should he remain here. She has already begun to enlighten him on our newest theories as to a Spontaneous Creation and a Consolidated Republic."

"Should think his properer study would be potatoes. Smells of the barn-yard in his talk," rejoined one of the party.

"Doctor Maria's a fool!" snapped Bluhm. "She has read the index to Bastian's book, and denies her Creator, and gabbles of Bacteria, boiled and unboiled, ever since."

Doctor McCall meanwhile went down the cinder-path, to all passers-by a clean-shaven, healthy gentleman out in search of an appetite for breakfast. But in reality he was deciding his whole life in that brief walk. Why, he asked himself once or twice, should he be unlike the other clean-shaven, healthy men that he met? God knows he had no relish for mystery. He was, as he had told Kitty, a commonplace man, a thrifty Delaware farmer, in hearty good-fellowship with his neighbors, his cattle, the ground he tilled, and, he thought reverently, with the God who had made him and them. He had made a mistake in his early youth, but it was a mistake which every tenth man makes—which had no doubt driven half these men and women about him into their visionary  creeds and hard work—that of an unhappy marriage. It was many years since he had heard of his wife: she had grown tired of warning him of the new paths of shame and crime she had found for herself. In fact, the year in which they had lived together was now so long past as to seem like a miserable half-forgotten dream.

Irretrievable? Yes, it was irretrievable. There was, first of all, the stupid, boyish error of a change of name. If he came back as this child wished, all the annoyance which that entailed would follow him, and the humiliating circumstances which had led to it would be brought to life from their unclean graves. His father believed him dead. Better the quiet, softened grief which that had left than the disgrace which would follow his return. "I should have to tell him my wife's story," muttered McCall. But he did not turn pale nor break into a cold sweat at the remembrance, as Miss Muller's hero should have done. This was an old sore—serious enough, but one which he meant to make the best of, according to his habit. He had been a fool, he thought, to come back and hang about the old place for the pleasure of hearing his father talked of, and of touching the things he had handled a day or two before. Growing into middle age, Hugh Guinness's likeness to his father had increased year by year. The two men were simple as boys in some respects, and would have been satisfied alone together. The younger man halted now on the foot-bridge which crossed the creek, looking out the different hollows where his father had taken him to fish when he was a boy, and thinking of their life then. "But his wife and mine would have to be put into the scales now," with an attempt at whistling which died out discordantly.

There was one person to whom the shameful confession of his marriage must be made—Miss Muller. That was the result, he thought, of his absurd whim of loitering about Berry town. When he had met Maria Muller before, he had no reason to think she cared a doit whether he was married or single. Now—McCall's color changed, alone as he was, with shame and annoyance. With all his experience of life and of women, he had as little self-confidence as an awkward girl. But Maria had left him no room for doubt.

"It would be the right thing to do. I ought to tell her. But it will be a slight matter to her, no doubt."

If he had been a single man, in all probability he would have asked Maria Muller to marry him that day. He was a susceptible fellow, with a man's ordinary vanity and passions; and Maria's bright sweet face, their loiterings along shady lanes and under Bourbon roses, the perpetual deference she paid to his stupendous intellect, had had due effect. He was not the man to see a strong, beautiful woman turn pale and tremble at his touch, and preserve his phlegm.

He threw away his cigar, and jumped the fence into the Water-cure grounds. "I'll tell her now, and then be off from old Berry town for ever."

Miss Muller was standing in the porch. She leaned over the railing, looking at the ragged rain-clouds driven swiftly over the blue distance, and at the wet cornfields and clumps of bay bushes gray with berries which filled the damp air with their pungent smell. Her dog, a little black-and-tan terrier, bit at her skirt. She had just been lecturing to her three students on the vertebrae, and when she took him up could not help fumbling over his bones, even while she perceived the color and scent of the morning. They gave her so keen a pleasure that the tears rushed to her eyes, and she stopped punching Hero's back.

"'The rain is over and gone,'" she recited softly to herself, "'the vines with the tender grape give a good smell, and the time of the singing of birds has come.' There is no poetry like that old Hebrew love-song. If only it had not been hackneyed by being turned into a theological allegory! Ha, doggy, doggy! There comes a friend of ours!" suddenly laughing and hugging him as she caught sight of a large man coming  up the road with a swinging gait and loose white overcoat. She broke off a rose and put it in her breast, tied on her hat and hurried down to meet him, the Song of Solomon still keeping time with her thoughts in a lofty cadence: "'Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness leaning upon his beloved? Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm. For love is strong as death.'"

"What's that, Maria? I heard you intoning as I came up the hill?" Her eyes were soft and luminous and her voice unsteady. I am afraid Doctor McCall's eyes were warmer in their admiration than they should have been under the circumstances. Why should she not tell him? She repeated it. She had been chattering for two hours on cervical, dorsal and lumbar vertebrae, without stopping to take breath. But she grew red now and broke down miserably.

"'Love is strong as death,' eh?" said McCall, awkwardly holding the gate open for her. "Friendship ought to be tough enough to bear a pretty stout strain, then. Such friendship as ours, I mean. For I think a man and woman can be friends without—without—Well, what do you think, Maria?" feeling a sudden imbecility in all his big body.

The little woman beside him looked up scared and ready to cry: "I don't know, John, I'm sure. Do be quiet, Hero!" Then like a flash she saw that he meant to ask her to marry him: he meant to place love upon the higher basis of friendship. Maria was used to people who found new names for old things. Why! why! what folly was this, as she grew cold and hot by turns? So often she had pictured his coming to claim her, and how she would go out as one calm controlling soul should to meet another, to be dual yet united through all eternity; and here she was shivering and tongue-tied, like any silly school-girl! Love-making and marriage were at a discount with the Advanced Club of which she was a member, and classed with dancing, fashionable dressing and other such paltry feminine frivolities. But Maria had meant to show them that a woman could really love and marry, and preserve her own dignity. She tried to find her footing now.

"Come into the summer-house, John. I should think our friendship would bear any strain, for it does not depend on external ties."

"No, that's true. Now, as to your phalansteries and women's clubs and sitz-baths, why that's all flummery to me. But young women must have their whims until they have husbands to occupy their minds, I suppose. There's that little girl at the Book-shop: how many leagues of tatting do you suppose she makes in a year?"

"I really cannot say," sharply.

"But as to our friendship, Maria—"

"Yes. There may be a lack of external bonds" (speaking deliberately, for she wanted to remember this crisis of her life as accurate in all its minutiae); "but there is a primal unity, a mysterious sympathy, in power and emotion. At least, so it seems to me," suddenly stammering and picking up Hero to avoid looking at McCall, who stood in front of her.

"I don't know. Primal unities are rather hazy to me. I can tell by a woman's eye and hand-shake if she is pure-minded and sweet-tempered, and pretty well, too, what she thinks of me. That's about as far as I go."

"It pleases you to wear this mask of dullness, I know," with an indulgent smile, with which Titania might have fondled the ass's head.

"But as to our friendship," gravely, "I feel I've hardly been fair to you. Friendship demands candor, and there is one matter on which I have not dealt plainly with you. You have been an honest, firm friend to me, Maria. I had no right to withhold my confidence from you."

If Miss Muller had not been known as an advanced philosopher, basing her life upon the Central Truths, she would have gained some credit as a shrewd woman of business. "What do you mean, John?" she said, turning a cool I steady countenance toward him.

"Sit down and I will tell you what I mean."

The patients, taking soon after their two hours' exercise, made their jokes on the battle between the two systems, seeing the allopathist McCall and Doctor Maria Haynes Muller in the summer-house engaged in such long and earnest converse. Homoeopathy, they guessed, had the worst of it, for the lady was visibly agitated and McCall apparently unmoved. Indeed, when he left her and crossed the garden, nodding to such of them as he knew, he had a satisfied, relieved face.

Maria went immediately in to visit her ward as usual. The patients observed that she was milder than was her wont, and deadly pale. One of them, addressing her as "Miss Muller," however, was sharply rebuked: "I earned my right to the title of physician too hardly to give it up for that which belongs to every simpering school-girl," she said. "Besides," with a queer pitiful smile, "the sooner we doctors sink the fact that we are women the better for the cause—and for us."

She met her brother in the course of the morning, and drew him into the consulting-room.

"William," she said, fumbling with the buttons of his coat, "he is going: he is going to take the afternoon train."

"Who? That fellow McCall?"

"Why do you speak so of him, William? He has just told me his story. He is so wretched! he has been used so hardly!" She could scarcely keep back the tears. In her new weakness and weariness it was such comfort to talk to and hang upon this fat, stupid little brother, whom usually she despised.

"Wretched, eh? He don't look it, then. As stout and easy-going a fellow as I know. Come, come, Maria! The man has been imposing some story on you to work on your sensibilities. I never fancied him, as you know. He doesn't want to borrow money, eh?" with sudden alarm.

"Money? No."

"What is it, then? Don't look at me in that dazed way. You, are going to have one of your attacks. I do wish you had Kitty's constitution and some sense."

"William," rousing herself, "he is going. He will never come back to Berrytown or to me. Our whole lives depend on my seeing him once more. Ask him to wait for a day—an hour."

"If he doesn't take the noon express, he can't go in an hour. You certainly know that, Maria. Well, if I have to find him, I'd better go at once," buttoning his coat irritably. "I never did like the fellow."

"Beg him to stay. Tell him that I have thought of a way of escape," following him, catching him by his sleeve, her small face absolutely without color and her eyes glittering.

"Yes, I'm going. But I must find my overshoes first. It begins to look like rain."

Miss Muller watched him to the door, and then crossed the hall to her own room, locking the door behind her. The square table was piled with medical books. She sat down and dropped her head on her arms. Over went a bound volume of the Lancet and a folio on diseases of the kidneys to the floor. She looked down at them. "And I was willing to give him up for that—that trash!" sobbing and rubbing her arms like a beaten child. But she had so strong a habit of talking that even in this pain the words would come: "I loved him so. He would have married me! And I must be kept from him by a law of society! It is—it is," rising and wrenching her hands together, "a damnable law!"

For Miss Muller had taught herself to think and talk like a man.

REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]