BERRYTOWN.

CHAPTER XI.

Catharine sprang from her bed at daybreak that morning. She could scarcely stop singing in the bath. She had so much to do, so much to do! The air blew briskly, the factory bells were clanging, the bees buzzed, the pretty white curtains were flapping. It was a busy world, and she was busiest of all. Had she not Hugh Guinness's fate in hand? She felt like a lad when he comes of age or makes his first venture in business. Jane heard her singing noisily for a while, but when breakfast was ready she did not come down.

She was standing in front of her glass, staring at it as though the chubby, insignificant face there were the Sphinx and could answer the riddles of life. McCall's remark had suddenly recurred to her: "What is Hugh Guinness to you? You belong to another man." With a flash, Mr. Muller, natty and plump, had stood before her, curiously unfamiliar, mildly regarding her through his spectacles. Her husband! Why had she never understood that until this morning? Her crossed hands lay on her wide blue-veined shoulders. She almost tore the flesh from them. "I belong to no man!" she cried.

She could not shake off the thought of him, as she usually did. He stood beside her, do what she would—the fat body and legs, the finical dress, the wearisome platitudes, a regiment of blue-coated, thick-lipped children behind him.

"If the best were done for them that could be hoped, they would but grow up miniature Mullers; and to think of that!" said Kitty. She had given her life to him. If she lived to be gray-headed, he alone owned her, mind and body. "If I were dead in my coffin, he would put his mild, fat little hand on me, and look forward to owning me in heaven! Oh-h!" This last was the one unendurable pang to Catharine.

Jane at the moment thrust her black face in: "He's come. Hurry up, honey! Mr. Muller, ob course. Shell I do up your hair, chile?"

Kitty shook her head and smiled. She would have had a kind smile for Jane and her like if she had been held by thumbscrews. Stooping to button her gaiters, she caught sight of her face in the glass. There were dark hollows under the eyes: they had the look of an older, graver woman than she had ever been before. Kitty hung up the green dress she had meant to wear, and took down a rose-colored one. Mr. Muller was talking down stairs. There was reality. There was her work and her husband. Why, she had the account-books of the school in her upper bureau-drawer at that moment, and in the lower ones her wedding things. Dresses and cloaks all made; and such lovely linen! As for Hugh Guinness, he was, after all, but a perplexing shadow, a riddle that turned from her the more she tried to make him real. She went down.

"Why, Catharine!" He held her hand, patting it between his own, which were warm and moist. "I really could not deny myself a glimpse of you, though I was sent on an errand by Maria to the station. But all roads end for me in the Book-shop. That is natural—he! he!"

"Yes, it is natural."

"It must be only a glimpse, though. I begged of Jane a cup of hot tea, to take off the chill of this morning air. Ah, here it is: thank you, my good girl. Only a glimpse, for Maria's business was urgent: Maria's business always is urgent. But I was to intercept Doctor McCall on his way to the cars."

"Is he going this morning?"

"Yes. Not to return, it appears."

"Not to return?" Her voice seemed hardly to have the energy of a question in it.

"But I," with a shrug and significant laugh,  "am not to allow him to go. Behold in me an emissary of Love! You; would not have suspected a Mercury in your William, Catharine?" Within the last month he had begun to talk down in this fashion to her, accommodating himself to her childish tastes.

"What is Mercury's errand?"

"Aha! you curious little puss! How a woman does prick her ears at the mention of a love-story! Though, I suppose, this one is wellnigh its end. Maria made no secret of it. Doctor McCall, I inferred from what she said, had been pouring out his troubles in her ear, and she sent me to bring him back to her with the message that she had found a way of escape from them. Eh? Did you speak? You did not know what, dear?"

"I did not know that Maria had the right to bring him back. They are—"

"Engaged? Oh, certainly. At least—It is an old attachment, and Maria is such a woman to manage, you know! Is that the tea-pot, Jane? Just fill my cup again. Oh yes, I suppose it is all settled."

Catharine was standing by the window. The wind blew in chilly and strong, while Mr. Muller behind her sipped his tea and ambled in his talk. Crossing the meadow, going down the road, she saw the large figure of a man in a loose light overcoat, who swung in his gait and carried his hat in his hand as a boy would do. Even if he had loved her, she could not, like Maria, have gone a step to meet him, nor intoned the Song of Solomon. But he did not love her.

She turned to her companion: "There is something I wished to say."

"In one moment, my dear." He was sweetening his tea. Hanging the silver tongs on the lid, he looked up: "Good God, Catharine! what is it?"

"I wished to tell you—no, don't touch me, please—this is a mistake which we have made, and it is better to let it go no farther. It ought to end now."

"End? Now?" But he was not surprised. The pale face staring at her over the half-emptied cup looked as if it had been waiting to hear this; so that they began the subject, as it were, in the middle. So much had already been said between them without words. He set the cup down, even in that moment folding his napkin neatly with shaking fingers. Kitty did not laugh. She never laughed at him afterward. Something in that large, loose figure yonder, going away from her to the woman he loved, had whetted her eyesight and her judgment. She saw the man at last under Muller's weak finical ways, and the manly look he gave her.

"You mean that there must be no—no marriage?"

"No. I'm very sorry. It has been my fault. But I thought—"

"You thought you loved me, and you do not. Don't cry, Kitty."

A long silence followed, which seemed to Catharine like that of death. It was noticeable that he did not make a single effort to change her resolution or to keep her. It seemed as if he must have been waiting for her to waken some day and see the gulf between them.

"Don't cry, Kitty," he said again, under his breath. He stood by the empty fireplace, resting his dainty foot on the fender and looking down on it: he took out his handkerchief, shook out its folds and wiped his face, which was hot and parched. Kitty was sorry, as she said—sorry and scared, as though she had been called on to touch the corpse of one dear to her friends, but whose death cost her nothing. That she was breaking an obligation she had incurred voluntarily troubled her very little.

"Yes, I thought you would say this one day," he said at last. "I think you are right to take care of yourself. I was too old a man for you to marry. But I would have done all I could. I have been very fond of you," looking at her.

"Yes. You never seemed old to me sir."

"And your work for the poor children? I thought, dear, you felt that the Lord called you to that?"

"So I did. But I don't think I feel it so much to-day." Catharine's eyes were wide with this new terror. Was she, then, turning her back on her God?

She was, after all, he thought, nothing but a frightened, beautiful child.

"I should have been too rough for you," he said. How was he to suspect the heights from which she had looked down on his softness and flippancy?

She observed that he said not a word of the preparations he had made, the house furnished, the expectant congregation, or the storm of gossip and scandal which would follow him as a jilted lover. Was the real wound, then, so deep? Or did he overlook such trifles, as men do?

"I did not forget the new dresses and underclothes," thought Kitty, mean and mortified.

He roused himself as Jane came in: "No, Jane, no more tea. Yes, that is my cup on the mantel-shelf."

"Dah's a gen'leman, Miss Kitty. I took him in the Book-shop. 'T mought be Spellissy 'bout de oats. Tink it is Spellissy."

"You had better go, Catharine," taking up his hat.

"It is not important." The door closed after Jane. She came close to him, irresolute. What could she say? She thought, with the heat of childishness, that she would give the blood out of her body, drop by drop, to comfort him. She wished that she had gone on and married him. "But I cannot say that I love him." This was a matter for life and death—even Kitty's polite soul recognized that—and not for a civil lie.

Again the man asserted himself before the woman: "No, there is nothing for you to say, Catharine," smiling. "There are some things it is better not to varnish over with words." He took up his hat after a pause, and turned a feeble, uncertain face to the window: "I—I might as well go now: I have a prayer-meeting this afternoon."

"And when you go you mean never to come back again?" cried Kitty, pale and red in a moment. "That's to be the end of it all?"

"What more can there be? It's all said." Yet after he had walked to the door he stood on the steps, looking about the room which had grown so familiar and dear to him. At Kitty he did not look.

"Will you have a rose?" breaking one hastily from the trailing branches at the window. "To remember the old Book-shop." She had never given him anything before.

He threw it down: "I do not need a rose to make me remember," bitterly. "It is all said, child? You have nothing to tell me?" looking furtively at her.

For a long time she did not speak: "No, nothing."

"Good-bye, Kitty."

Kitty did not answer him. The tears ran hot and salt over her round cheeks as she watched the little man disappear through the walnuts. She went up stairs, and, still crying, chose one or two maudlin sonnets and a lock of black hair as mementoes to keep of him. She did keep them as long as she lived, and used frequently to sigh over them with a sentimental tenderness which the real Muller never had won from her.

CHAPTER XII.

Miss Muller's message was never delivered, but Doctor McCall did not leave Berrytown that morning. Going down the road, he had caught sight of the old Book-house, and Kitty in her pink wrapper at the window. He overheard Symmes, the clerk at the station, say to some lounger that Peter Guinness would be at home that day or the next. He took his valise to the baggage-room.

"My business is not pressing," he said to Symmes. "No need to be off until this evening."

Perhaps he could see the old man, himself unseen, he thought with a boyish choking in his throat. He could surely give one more day to the remembrance of that old sweet, hearty boy's life without wronging the wretched ghost of a wife whose hand clutched so much away from him.

Miss Muller, seeing him on the bridge from the windows of her room, supposed her message had been given: "He has stayed to know how he may win me."  For the first time she faced the riddle squarely. In the morning she had only wished weakly to keep him beside her.

He was married. Popular novels offered recipes by the score for the cure of such difficulties in love. But Maria was no reader of novels. Out of a strict Calvinistic family she and her brother had leaped into heterodoxy—William to pause neatly poised on the line where Conventionalism ended; Maria to flounder in an unsounded quagmire, which she believed the well of Truth. Five years ago she would have felt her chance of salvation in danger if she had spoken to a woman who persisted in loving a married man. But five years work strange changes in the creeds of young women now-a-days; and Maria's heart was choosing her creed for her to-day, according to the custom of her sex.

She saw Doctor McCall idly leaning over the foot-bridge of the creek while he smoked. Passion and brilliancy unknown to them before came into her dark eyes: she stretched out her hands as though she would have dragged him to her: "Must I give him up because of this wife whom he long ago cast off?"

If she tempted him to marry her? She knew what name her old church, her old friends, even her father, who was still living, would apply to her. Some of these people with whom she had lately cast in her lot had different views on the subject of marriage. Hitherto, Maria had kept clear of them. "The white wings of her Thought," she had said, "should not be soiled by venturing near impurity." Now she remembered their arguments against marriage as profound and convincing.

"I could not suggest to him myself this way of escape," she thought, the red dying her face and neck. "I could not." But there was to be a meeting that very evening of the "Inner Light Club," in which Maria was a M.H.G. (Most Honorable Guide), and the subject for discussion would be, "Shall marriage in the Advanced Consolidated Republic be for life or for a term of years?" The profoundest thinkers in the society would bring to this vital question all their strength and knowledge, and, as they had all made up their minds beforehand against bondage and babies, the verdict was likely to be unanimous.

She would contrive that McCall should be one of the audience: the wisdom and truth of the arguments would shine in like a great light on his life, and he would start up a new man, throwing aside this heaviest yoke of social slavery. She would be there ("with a black lace mantilla and veil—so much better than a bonnet," she breathlessly resolved), and at the sight of her he would feel the divine force of true love bringing them together, and claim her as his own.

The modern Cleopatra fights upon the rostrum, in lieu of "sixty sail," and uses as weapons newspaper and club, instead of purple robe and "cloyless sauce of epicurean cook," but the guerdon of the battle is none the less Mark Antony.

At sundown that evening Doctor McCall was piloted by little Herr Bluhm to his office; the Herr, according to his wont, sternly solemn, McCall disposed to be hilarious, as suited the pleasant temperature of the evening.

"Club, eh? Inner Light? Oh yes, I've no objections. One picks up good ideas here, there, anywhere. Meets in your office?"

"Yes—a shabby, vulgar place to the outer eye, but so many noble souls have there struggled out of darkness into light, such mighty Truths have been born there which will guide the age, that to me it is the very Holy Ground of Ideas."

"So?" McCall looked at the little man out of the corner of his eye, and nodded gravely.

"It is a Woman's Club, though men take part in it. But we have such faith in the superior integrity and purity of woman's mind when brought to bear on great but hackneyed questions that we willingly stand back until she has given her verdict. The magnet, sir, pointing out with inexplicable intelligence the true path to humanity."

"Well, I don't know about that.  Though it's very likely, very likely," hurriedly. McCall had no relish for argument about it. He was more secure of his intellect in the matter of peaches than inner lights. Cowed and awed as he could have been by no body of men, he followed Bluhm up a dirty flight of stairs into the assemblage of Superior Women. The office was by nature a chamber with gaudy wall-paper of bouquets and wreaths. Viewed as an office, it was well enough, but in the aesthetic, light of a Holy Ground of Ideas it needed sweeping. The paper, too, hung in flaps from the damp walls: dusty files of newspapers, an empty bird-cage, old boots, a case of medical books, a pair of dilapidated trousers filled up one side of the room. A pot of clove-pinks in the window struggled to drown with spicy fragrance the odor of stale tobacco smoke. There was a hempen carpet, inch deep with mud and dust, on the floor. Seated round an empty fireplace, on cane chairs and in solemn circle, were about forty followers of the Inner Light. McCall perceived Maria near the window, the dusky twilight bringing out with fine effect her delicate, beautiful face. He turned quickly to the others, looking for the popular type of the Advanced Female, in loose sacque and men's trousers, with bonnet a-top, hair cut short, sharp nose and sharper voice. She was not there. A third of the women were Quakers, with their calm, benign faces for the most part framed by white hair—women who, having fought successfully against slavery, when that victory was won had taken up arms against the oppressors of women with devout and faithful purpose. The rest McCall declared to himself to be "rather a good-looking lot—women who had," he guessed shrewdly, "been in lack of either enough to eat or somebody to love in the world, and who fancied the ballot-box would bring them an equivalent for a husband or market-money."

A little dish-faced woman in rusty black, and with whitish curls surmounted by a faded blue velvet bonnet laid flat on top of her head, had the floor: "Mr. Chairman—I mean Miss Chairman—the object of our meeting this evening is, Shall marriage in the Consolidated Republic—"

"I object!" Herr Bluhm sprang to his feet, wrapping a short mantle like a Roman toga across his chest, and wearing a portentous frown upon his brow, "There is business of the last meeting which is not finished. Shall the thanks of this club be presented to the owners of the Berrytown street-cars for free passes therein? That is the topic for consideration. I move that a vote of thanks be passed;" and he sat down gloomily.

"I do not second that motion." A tall woman, with the magisterial sweep of shawl and wave of the arm of a cheap boarding-house keeper, rose. "I detect a subtle purpose in that offer. There is a rat behind that arras. There is a prejudice against us in the legislature, and the car company wish no mention of Woman Suffrage to be made in Berrytown until their new charter is granted. Are we so cheaply bought?—bribed by a dead-head ticket!"

"The order of the day," resumed the little widow placidly, "is, Shall marriage in the Consol—"

"Legislature!" piped a weak voice in the crowd. "They only laugh at us in the legislature."

"Let them laugh: they laughed at the slave." The speaker hurled this in a deep bass voice full at McCall. She was a black-browed, handsome young woman, wrapped in a good deal of scarlet, who sat sideways on one chair with her feet on the rung of another. "How long will the world dare to laugh?" fixing him fiercely with her eye.

"Upon my word, madam, I don't know," McCall gasped, and checked himself, hot and uncomfortable.

A fat, handsomely-dressed woman jolted the chair in front of her to command attention: "On the question of marriage—"

"Address the chair," growled Bluhm.

"Miss Chairman, I want to say that I ought to be qualified to speak on marriage, being the mother of ten, to say nothing of twice twins."

"The question before the house is the  street-car passes," thundered Bluhm. "I move that we at least thank them for their offer. When a cup of tea is passed me, I thank the giver: when the biscuits are handed, I do likewise. It is a simple matter of courtesy."

"I deny it," said the black-browed female with a tone of tragedy. "What substantial tea has been offered? what biscuits have been baked? It is not tea: it is bribery! It is not biscuits: it is corruption!"

"I second Herr Bluhm's motion."

"Miss Chairman, put the question on its passage."

A mild old Quakeress rose, thus called on: "Thee has made a motion, Friend Bluhm, and Sister Carr says she seconds it; so it seems to me—Indeed I don't understand this parliamentary work."

"You're doing very nicely."

"All right!" called out several voices.

"Why should we have these trivial parliamentary forms?" demanded the Tragic Muse, as McCall called her. "Away with all worn-out garments of a degraded Past! Shall the rebellious serf of man still wear his old clothes?"

"But," whispered McCall to Bluhm, "when will the great thinkers you talked of begin to speak on those mighty truths—"

"Patience! These are our great thinkers. The logical heads some of them have! Woman," standing up and beginning aloud, apropos to nothing—"Woman is destined to purify the ballot-box, reform the jury, whiten the ermine of the judge. [Applause.] When her divine intuitions, her calm reason, are brought into play—" Prolonged applause, in the midst of which Bluhm, again apropos to nothing, abruptly sat down.

"The order of the day," said the little woman in black, "is, Shall marriage—"

"What about the car company?"

"Let's shelve that."

"The question of marriage," began Bluhm, up again with a statelier wrap of his toga, "is the most momentous affecting mankind. It demands free speech, the freest speech. Are we resolved to approach it in proud humility, giving to the God within ourselves and within our neighbor freedom to declare the truth?"

"Ay!" "Ay!" from forty voices. Maria, pale and trembling, watched McCall.

"Free speech is our boast," piped the widow. "If not ours, whose?"

"Before you go any farther," said the Muse with studied politeness, "I have a question to put to Herr Bluhm. Did you did you not, sir, in Toombs's drug-store last week, denominate this club a caravan of idiots?" A breathless silence fell upon the assembly. Bluhm gasped inarticulately. "His face condemns him," pursued his accuser. "Shall such a man be allowed to speak among us? Ay, to take the lead among us?"

Cries of "No!" "No!"

"What becomes of your free speech?" cried Bluhm, red and stammering with fury. "I was angry. I am rough, perhaps, but I seek the truth, as those do not who"—advancing and shaking his shut hand at the Muse—"who 'smile and smile, and are a villain still.'"

"The order of the day"—the widow's voice rose above the din tranquilly—"is Shall marriage in the Consolidated Republic be contracted for life or for a term of years?"

The next moment Maria felt her arm grasped. "Come out of this," whispered McCall, angry and excited. "This is no place for you, Maria. Did you hear what they are going to discuss?"

"Yes," as he whisked her out of the door.

"Then I'm sorry for it. Such things oughtn't to be mentioned in a lady's presence. If I had a sister, she should not know there was such a thing as bigamy. Good God!" wiping his forehead with his handkerchief, "if women are not pure and spotless, what have we to look up to? And these shallow girls, who propose to reform the world, begin by dabbling with the filth of the gutter, if they do no worse?"

"Shallow girls?" He was so big and angry that she felt like a wren or sparrow in his hold. But the stupidity of him! the blind idiocy! She eyed him  from head to foot with a bitterness and contempt unutterable—a handsome six-foot animal, with his small brain filled with smaller, worn-out prejudices! The way of escape had been set before him, and he had spurned it—and her!

"I don't see what it can matter to you," she said politely, disengaging herself, "whether I make friends with these people and am stained with the filth of the gutter or not?" She had a half-insane consciousness that she was playing her last card.

"Why, to be sure it matters. You and I have been good friends always, Maria, and I don't like to see you fellowship with that lot. What was it Bluhm called them?" laughing. "That was rough in Bluhm—rough. They're women."

"You are going?"

"In the next train, yes, I waited to see a—a friend, but he did not come. It's just as well, perhaps," his face saddened. "Well, good-bye, Maria. Don't be offended at me for not approving of your friends. Why, bless my soul! such talk is—it's not decent;" and with a careless shake of the hand he was gone.

Maria told herself that she despised a man who could so dismiss the great social problem and its prophets with a fillip of his thumb. She turned to go in to the assemblage of prophets. They were all that was left her in life. But she did not go in. She went to her bare chamber, and took Hero up on her lap and cried over him. "You love me, doggy?" she said.

She had an attack of syncope that night, for which no pack or sitz proved a remedy; and it was about that time that the long and painful affection of the ulnar nerve began which almost destroyed her usefulness as a surgeon.

CHAPTER XIII.

That evening, as Miss Muller sat alone with Hero in her room (just as the neuralgia was beginning), the door opened and Miss Vogdes entered. The girl turned a harassed, worn countenance toward Maria, and stumbled awkwardly over her words. It was not, certainly, because she was conscious that she had used William Muller cruelly. She had forgotten that William Muller lived.

She had been thinking of Maria all day. She was the woman whom Doctor McCall loved. By the time night came Kitty had a maddening desire to see again this woman that he loved—to touch her, hear her speak. She had been used to regard her as a disagreeable bore, but now she looked on her as a woman set apart from all the world. She had made a poor excuse to come up to the Water-cure: now that she was there she half forgot it. Maria's delicate face, her quick grace of motion, her clear, well-bred voice, were so many stabs to Kitty, each of which touched the quick. Maria's hair hung loosely over her shoulders: it was very soft and thick. She wondered if Doctor McCall had ever touched it. "Though what right have I to know?" For some reason this last was the pang that tugged hardest at Kitty's heart.

"I brought a message for Doctor McCall," she said, fumbling in her pocket—"that is, for you to deliver to him, Maria."

Miss Muller turned her shoulder to her: "Doctor McCall is gone—I don't know where."

She started forward: "Gone? To come again, you mean?"

"No—never to come back!" vehemently.

Kitty stood by her silent a moment: "William told me that you sent for him, that he loved you, Maria—that you would be married some of these days."

Miss Muller hesitated: there was no use in revealing her humiliation to this girl: "There was an obstacle in the way. Doctor McCall is peculiarly hedged in by circumstances."

"And you could not find the way of escape?"

"No." She did not see the flash of triumph on the girl's face, or notice when she went out.

Kitty was human. "At least," she muttered going down the hill, "I shall not have to see her his wife." When she had reached the Book-shop she took from her pocket a coarse yellow envelope containing a telegram directed to Hugh Guinness in his father's care. She turned it over. This was a bond between them which even Maria did not share: she alone knew that he was Hugh Guinness.

"What am I to do with this?"

Doctor McCall was gone, never to come back. It was like touching his hand far off to read this message to him. Besides, Kitty was curious. She opened the envelope.

"Come to me at once. You will soon be free," without any signature but an initial. The melodramatic mystery of it would have cautioned knowing women, but Kitty was not knowing.

"If he had received this an hour ago, the 'way of escape' would have been found. He would have been free to marry Maria." So much she understood. She sat down and was quiet for half an hour. It was the first wretched half hour of her life—so wretched that she forgot to cry.

"It would make him very happy to marry Maria," she said, getting up and speaking aloud. Then she opened the door and went up to her chamber, her thoughts keeping time with her swift motions. It seemed to her that she still spoke aloud. "If I were a man I could go to this house in Philadelphia and receive this message, which will set him free" (beginning to fold the dresses in her closet). "It will never reach him otherwise. I could find and bring him to Maria. But I never was five miles from Berrytown in my life, I never could go" (dragging out a great trunk and packing the dresses into it). "It would be a friendly thing for some man to do for him. Maria could not do so much" (cramming in undergarments enough for a year's wear). "If I were a man! He'd not snub me then as he does now, when I am only Kitty. If this could be done it would bring happiness for life to him." (The trunk was packed as she had seen her mother's. She was on her knees, trying to force down the lid, but her wrists were too weak.) "He would come back at once. How lovely Maria looked in that black lace mantilla! He would kiss her mouth and smooth her hair." (Kitty, still kneeling, was staring at the wall with pale cheeks and distended eyes. The lock snapped as it shut. She rose and began putting on her gray hat and veil.) "No woman could go to the city through that dark; and there is a storm coming. If I did it, what would he care for me? I am only Kitty. I would sit in the window here alone year after year, growing into a neglected old maid, and watch him go by with his happy wife and children. I need not interfere. I can throw the telegram into the fire and let them both go their ways. What are they to me?" She had buttoned her sacque and gloves, and now went up to the glass. It was a childish face that she looked at, but one now exceptionally grave and reserved.

She walked quickly down and tapped at the kitchen door: "When the porter comes for my trunk, Jane, give it to him. Tell my mother when she comes it was necessary for me to leave home to help a friend. I shall be back in a few days—if I am alive."

"De Lord be good to us, honey!" Jane stood aghast. Kitty came suddenly up to the old woman and kissed her. She felt quite alone in the world in beginning this desperate undertaking. The next moment she passed the window and was gone.

Miss Muller, with a satchel and shawl-strap, would have started coolly at an hour's notice alone for the Yosemite or Japan. But Kitty, with the enormous trunk, which was her sole idea of travel, set out through the night and storm, feeling death clutching at her on every side.

An hour after nightfall that evening the Eastern express-train reached the station beyond Berrytown, bringing home Peter and his wife, triumphant. Her money had covered a larger extent of muslins and laces than she hoped for—enough to convert the raw  school-girl Kitty, when she was married, into a leader of church-going fashion.

Mrs. Guinness leaned back in the plush car-seat, planning the wedding-breakfast. That was now her only care. Out in the world of shops and milliners her superstitious dread of a man long since dead had seemed to her absurd.

"I have had some unreasonable fears about Kitty," she said to Peter, who was beginning to nod opposite to her. "But all will be well when she is Muller's wife."

Another train passed at the moment they reached the station. Her eye ran curiously over the long line of faces in the car-windows to find some neighbor or friend.

She touched Peter's arm: "How like that is to Kitty!" nodding toward a woman's head brought just opposite to them. The train began to move, and the woman turned her face toward them: "Merciful Heaven, it is Kitty!"

The engine sent out its shrill foreboding whistle and rushed on, carrying the girl into the darkness. Behind her in the car as it passed her mother saw the face of Hugh Guinness.

CHAPTER XIV.

Doctor McCall had been five minutes too late for the first train, and so had been delayed for the express in which Kitty started on her adventure. Commonplace accidents determine commonplace lives, was a favorite maxim of the Berrytown Illuminati. The Supreme Intelligence whom they complimented with respect could not be expected to hold such petty trifles or petty lives in His controlling hand.

Doctor McCall had seen Catharine when she first entered the station. Her very manner had the air of flight and secresy. Puzzled and annoyed, he sat down in the rear of the car, himself unseen. When they reached Philadelphia it was not yet dawn. The passengers rushed out of the cars: Kitty sat quiet. She had never slept outside of the Book-house before. She looked out at the dim-lighted dépôt, at the slouching dark figures that stole through it from time to time, the engines, with their hot red eyes, sweeping back and forward in the distance, breaking the night with portentous shrieks. Where should she go? She had never been in a hotel in her life: she had no money. If she ventured into the night she would be arrested, no doubt, as a vagrant. She had a gallant heart to take care of Hugh Guinness's life, but her poor little woman's body was quaking in deadly fear for herself. In a moment a decent mulatto woman, whom McCall had sent, came from the waiting-room into the deserted car.

"There is a room for ladies, where you can be comfortable until daybreak, madam," she said respectfully.

"I am much obliged to you," said Catharine.

When she saw how young she was, the mulatto, a motherly body, took her into a little inner snuggery used to store packages: "You can turn the key, and sleep if you will until morning."

"I'll not close my eyes until my errand is done," thought Kitty, and sat down in a rocking-chair, placing her satchel beside her. In five minutes she was fast asleep. McCall, pacing up and down the platform, could see her through the open window. He forgot to wonder why she had come. There was a certain neatness and freshness about her which he thought he had never observed in other women. After her night's travel her dress fell soft and gray as though just taken from the fold, her petticoat, crisp and white, peeped in one place to sight. How dainty and well-fitting were the little boots and gloves! Where the hair was drawn back, too, from her forehead he could see the blue veins and pink below the skin, like a baby's. He did not know before what keen eyes he had. But this was as though a breath of the old home when he had been a child, one of the dewy Bourbon roses in his father's garden, had followed him to the stifling town. It made the station different—even the morning. Fresh damp winds blew pleasantly from the  reddening sky. The white marble steps and lintels of the street shone clean and bright; the porters going by to the freight dépôt gave him good-day cheerfully. In the window the old mulatto had some thriving pots of ivy and fragrant geraniums. Even a dog that came frisking up the sidewalk rubbed itself in a friendly fashion against his legs.

McCall suddenly remembered a journey he had made long ago, and a companion whose breath was foul with opium as her head at night rested on his shoulder.

But there was no need that one woman's breath should sicken him even now with the whole world; and again he stopped in his walk to look at Kitty.

The fresh wind blowing on her wakened her presently. The mulatto was anxious to serve her: it was always the case with people of her class after Kitty had once spoken to them.

"I should like fresh water and towels," she said coolly, as though toilet appurtenances were to be found at every street corner. The woman paused, and then with a queer smile brought them. In a a few moments McCall saw her come out fresher than before.

"Where is this house?" showing a name and number to the mulatto, who read it once or twice, and then looked steadily at Kitty.

"Are you going alone to that place?"

"Certainly."

The woman gave her the directions without further parley, adding that it was about six miles distant, and turned away. Catharine followed her to thank her, and put a dollar note in her hand. It was all the money she had.

She walked on down the rapidly filling streets—for miles, as she thought. The hurry and rush of the day had begun. The sense of nothingness in the midst of this great multitude came upon Kitty. The fear, the excitement began to tell on her: yesterday she had eaten but little in her pity for Muller. "Which was very foolish of me," she said to herself. "Now I've no money to buy anything to eat. I have acted in this matter without common sense." The sun lighted up the yellow leaves of the maples along the sidewalk. The wind blew strongly up from the rivers. She passed a stand with some withered apples and stale cakes, and put her hand in her pocket, then with a wistful look went on.

It was late in the morning before she reached her journey's end. Showing her paper now and then, she had noticed the curious inquiring look which both men and women gave her on reading it. She found herself at last under a long gray stone wall pierced by an iron-knobbed gate. By the side of it a man was setting out on an eating-stand a half-eaten ham, chaffy rolls and pies yellow with age. The man was an old, cleanly shaven fellow, whose aquiline nose reminded her with a twinge of conscience of Mr. Muller.

"Am I near to this house?" showing her paper.

"Here," nodding back at the stone wall, cutting his pies.

"This! What is this place, sir?"

"Moyamensing Prison." He finished cutting the pies carefully, and then, wiping the knife, looked up at her, and suddenly came from behind the stand:

"You're not well?" pushing a seat toward her. "Here's some water. Or coffee?"

She sat down: "Oh, it's nothing. Only I've traveled a long way, and I did not know it was a prison I was coming to."

"Won't you have some coffee? You don't look rugged."

"No, thank you."

"Well, it's not what you've been used to, of course. But hot." He put the water within her reach and drew aside, looking at her now and then. He was used to the pale faces and tears of women at that gate. "Though she's different from them as has friends here," he thought, silencing one or two noisy customers by a look. Presently he came up to her: "You're afeard to go in there alone, young lady?"

"Yes, I am. What shall I do?"

"I thought as much. Yonder comes the chaplain. I'll speak to him," going to meet two gentlemen who crossed the street.

"You wished to see a prisoner?" one of them said, coming up to her.

Kitty was herself again. She stood up and bowed with her old-fashioned, grave politeness: "I do not know. It was this that brought me here," handing him the telegram.

"Ah? I remember," glancing at it. "Number 243 sent it, you recollect?" to his companion. "But this is addressed to Hugh Guinness?" turning inquiringly to Kitty.

"I am a—a member of his family. He was not at home, and I came to receive the message for him."

"Will you go in with us, doctor?" The chaplain turned to his companion.

"Presently. There is a man coming up the street I want to see."

The chaplain motioned her to follow him, casting a curious glance back at her. They passed up into the long stone corridors, tier over tier, with the lines of square iron doors, each with its slate dangling outside, with a name scrawled on it. He stopped at one, opened it and drew back, motioning her to enter.

Kitty caught sight of the damp wall of a cell, and stopped.

"Shall I go in with you?" seeing her shiver.

"No: Mr. Guinness might wish the message kept as private as possible."

"It is very probable. The prisoner is very ill, or you could not have a private interview."

She went in, and the door closed behind her. It was a moment before she could distinguish any object in the dimly lighted cell. Then she saw the square window, the cobwebbed walls, and close at hand a narrow pallet, on which lay a woman in a coarse and soiled night-dress. She was tall and gaunt: one arm was thrown over her head, framing a heavy-jawed, livid face, with dull black eyes fixed on Catharine.

"Who are you?" she said.

Kitty went straight up to her. The foul smell made her head reel. But this was only a woman, after all; and one in great bodily need—dying, she thought. Kitty was a born nurse. She involuntarily straightened the wretched pillows and touched the hot forehead before she spoke: "I came instead of Hugh Guinness. You had a message for him."

"I don't know. It doesn't matter for that," her eyes wandering. The soft touch and the kind face bending over her were more to her just now than all that had gone before in her life. "It is here the pain is," moving Kitty's hand to her side. The pain filled the dull eyes with tears. "This is a poor place to die in," trying to smile.

"Oh, you are not going to die," cheerfully. "Let me lift you up higher on the pillows. Put your arm about me—so. You're not too heavy for me to lift."

The woman, when she was arranged, took Kitty's fingers and feebly held them to her side. "It is so long since anybody took care of me. I sha'n't live till to-morrow. Don't leave me—don't go away."

"I'll not go away," said Kitty.

The man whom the prison physician had waited to meet was Doctor McCall. He had followed Kitty so far, unwilling to interfere by speaking to her. But when he saw her enter Moyamensing he thought that she needed a protector. "Ha, Pollard, is this you?" stopping to shake hands. They were old acquaintances, and managed, in spite of their profession, to see something of each other every year. McCall ran up to town once or twice through the winter, and stayed at Pollard's house, and Pollard managed to spend a week or two with him in peach season.

"I thought I knew your swing, McCall, two squares off. Looking for me?"

"No: I followed a lady, a friend of mine, who has just gone in at the gate."

"You know her, eh?" eagerly. "A most attractive little girl, I thought: She went in with the chaplain to see one of the prisoners."

McCall paused, his hand on the gate. A horrible doubt stopped his heart-beating for an instant. But how utterly absurd it was! Only because this black shadow pursued him always could such a fancy have come to him. "The prisoner  is a woman?" with forced carelessness.

"Yes. A poor wretch brought here last spring for shoplifting. Her term's out next week. She has had a sharp attack of pneumonia, and has not much strength to bear it: she is a miserable wreck from opium-eating."

"Opium-eating? Can I go in?" said McCall.

"Certainly."

When the woman heard their steps on the corridor she said to Catharine, "I hear my husband coming now."

"That will be pleasant for you," kindly, wondering to herself what sort of a ruffian had chosen this creature for a mate and had the burden of her to carry.

"Yes, I know his step," turning dully to the door. It opened, and Hugh Guinness stood on the threshold.

He halted one brief moment. It seemed to Catharine that he was an older man than she had known him.

"It is you, then, Louise?" he said calmly, going up to the bed and looking down on her, his hands clasped, as usual, behind him.

"Yes, it is I. I thought you would like to see me and talk things over before I died, Hugh." She held out her hand, but he did not touch it. Looking at her a moment from head to foot as she lay in her unclean garments, he turned to where the other woman stood, a ray of light from the window shining on her fair hair and innocent face: "Do you know that I am Hugh Guinness, Kitty?"

"I knew that long ago."

"This," nodding down at the pallet, "is my wife. Now do you know why I could not go home to my father or to you?"

"God help us!" ejaculated Pollard. The next moment, remembering himself, he put his hand on McCall's shoulder: "I understand. When you were a boy, eh? Never mind: every man has his own trouble to carry."

"I've been a very real trouble to you, Hugh," whined Louise. "But I always loved you: I always meant to come back to you."

"When her later husbands had abandoned her." McCall laughed savagely, turning away.

She started up on the pallet, clenching her bony, dirty hands: "There were faults on both sides. I never would have been the woman I am if you had loved me. What will you do with me now?"

There was a dead silence in the cell, broken only by the heavy breathing of the woman. McCall stood dumb, looking first at Catharine and then at his wife.

"This is what he will do," said Kitty's clear, quiet tones. "You shall be washed and dressed, and taken home as his wife, to live or die as suits God's will."

"Never," muttered McCall.

"How soon can she leave this—this place?" she said, turning as if he had not spoken to Pollard.

"As soon as she is able to be moved. But," hesitating, with a doubtful look at McCall, "is that plan best?"

"Why, she's his wife!" with her innocent eyes wide. "He has no right to desert her. She will die if she is not properly cared for," turning to McCall.

"Do you stay with me: don't leave me," holding Kitty's sleeve. "If you would nurse me, I should get well."

"It is impossible that the lady should nurse you," said Pollard.

Kitty sat down: she began to tremble and turn white. "She has nobody but me. I'll stay," she said quietly.

McCall beckoned his fellow-physician out into the corridor.

"My dear fellow—" Pollard began.

"No: I know you sympathize with me. But we will not talk of this matter. Is that woman dying?"

"I'm afraid—that is, I think not. She is decidedly better to-day than she was last night. With care she may recover."

Kitty came out and stood with them in the corridor. McCall looked at her with amazement. The shy, silly school-girl, afraid to find her way about Berrytown, bore herself in this desperate juncture like the sagest of matrons.

"Is there no hospital to which she can be taken?" she said to Pollard.

"Yes, of course, of course."

"I'll go with her there, then. You know," laying her hand on McCall's arm, "you did marry her. You ought to try to help her poor body and soul as long as she lives."

"Would you have me take her as my wife again?"

"Not for an hour!" cried Kitty vehemently. She went into the cell, but came back in a moment: "Will you bring me some breakfast? I shall not be of much use here until it comes."

"She has more of the angel in her than any woman I ever knew," muttered McCall.

"She has a good deal of common sense, apparently," rejoined Pollard.

Kitty went with McCall's wife to the hospital, and helped to nurse her for a week. Pains and chills and nausea she could help, but for the deeper disease of soul, for the cure of which Kitty prayed on her knees, often with tears, there was little hope in her simple remedies, unless the cure and its evidence lay deep enough for only God's eye to see.

The woman's nature, of a low type at birth, had grown more brutal with every year of drunkenness and vice. She died at last, alone with Kitty.

"She said, the last thing, 'God be merciful to me a sinner!'" Kitty told the chaplain. "But I am afraid she hardly understood the meaning."

"He understood, my dear child. We can leave her with Him, You must go home now: you have done all you could. Doctor McCall will go with you?"

"No, I shall go alone: I came alone."

"He will follow you home to Berrytown, then?" for the chaplain was but a man, and his curiosity was roused to know the exact relation between McCall and this old-fashioned, lovable girl.

Kitty hesitated: "I think he will come to Berrytown again. There is some business there which his wife's death will leave him free now to attend to."

She went to a sofa and sat down: "I shall be glad to be at home," beginning to cry. "I want to see father."

"Broke down utterly," the chaplain told his wife, "as soon as her terrible work was done."

As for Kitty, it seemed to her that her work in life and death was over for ever.

"You must come back," she said when McCall put her in the cars, looking like a ghost of herself. "Your father will be wanting to see you. And—and Maria."

"Maria? What the deuce is Maria to me?"

It was no ghost of Kitty that came home that evening. The shy, lively color came and went unceasingly, and her eyes sparkled.

"Poor Maria!" she whispered to her pillow as she went to bed—"poor Maria!"

CHAPTER XV.

It was a long time before he came. Months afterward, one evening when the express-train rushed into the dépôt, Catharine went down through the walnut trees into the garden. She stopped in the shadow as a man's figure crossed the fields. The air was cool—it was early spring. The clouds in the west threw the Book-house into shadow. Hugh Guinness, coming home, could see the narrow-paned windows twinkling behind the walnut boughs. It was just as he had left it when he was a boy. There was the cow thrusting her head through a break in the fence he had made himself; the yellow-billed ducks quacked about the pond he had dug in the barnyard; the row of lilacs by the orchard fence were just in blossom: they were always the latest on the farm, he remembered. He saw Kitty, like the heart of his old home, waiting for him. Her white dress and the hair pushed back from her face gave her an appearance of curious gentleness and delicacy.

When he came to her he took both her hands in his.

"You will come to your father now?" she said, frightened and pale.

They walked side by side down the thick rows of young saplings. There was a cool bank overgrown with trumpet-creeper. Inside, he caught sight of a  little recess or cave, and a gray old bench on which was just room for two.

"Will you stop here and sit down one moment?" she said.

It was nothing to him but a deserted spring-house. It was the one enchanted spot of Kitty's life.

Half an hour afterward they found old Peter playing on his violin at the doorstep. Kitty had often planned an effective bringing back of Hugh to him, but she forgot it all, and creeping up put her hands about his neck. "Father! look there, father!" she whispered.

The Book-house still stands among its walnuts in Berrytown. But a shrewd young fellow from New York has charge of it now, who deals principally in school-books and publications relative to Reforms and raspberries. Old Peter Guinness still holds an interest in it, although his chief business is that of special agent for libraries in buying rare books and pamphlets. He comes down for two or three weeks in winter to look into matters. But since his wife died he makes his home in Delaware with his son, who married, as all Berrytown knows, Kitty Vogdes after she behaved so shamefully to Mr. Muller.

Mrs. Guinness died in high good-humor with her son-in-law. "Doctor McCall," she assured her neighbors, "was exactly the man she should have chosen for Catharine. She had known him from a boy, and knew that his high social position and wealth were only his deserts. A member—vestryman indeed—of St. Luke's Church, the largest in Sussex county."

The farm-people in the sleepy, sunny Delaware neighborhood have elected Kitty a chief favorite. "A gentle, good-natured little woman, with no opinions of her own. A bit too fond of dress perhaps, and a silly, doting mother, but the most neighborly, lovable creature alive, after all."

Miss Muller was down in St. George's lecturing last fall, and made her mark, as she always does. But the Guinness men were now hopelessly conservative. She made her home with Kitty.

"A fine woman," old Peter said the morning after she was gone.

"Never knew a woman with a finer mind," said Hugh. "Nor many men."

"She nurses that dog as if it were a baby," said Kitty sharply. "It's silly! It's disgusting!"

Peter twanged his bow on the porch, looking down over the great farm-slopes stretching away in the morning light.

"We have everything to make life good to us, Hugh," he said after Kitty had gone. "And the best thing, to my notion, is an old-fashioned woman in the house, with no notion of ruling, like that Muller girl and her set."

Hugh was romping with his boy: "Do you know your first business in this world, sir? To take care of your mother," glancing at the garden, where Kitty, in her pretty white dress, was clipping chrysanthemums.

She rules him and the house and their lives absolutely, with but little regard for justice. But he has never suspected it. She hardly knows herself that she does it.

REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.