Kate turned softly and waited at the foot of the stairs for her father.  He came presently, looking worried and embarrassed.

“Now don’t go to imagining mysteries here.  This is a man who has been on my hands a good many years.  He is an irreclaimable spendthrift.  He was in other days a man of repute and station.  I am interested in him, through old ties, since the days we were boys.”

“The carriage is here, papa; won’t you come home with me?”

“Yes; you get into the carriage.”

He reappeared presently, the face of a strange woman, that Kate had not seen, peering over his shoulder into the carriage as he came down the steps.  Kate instantly divined that he had been warning the landlady against admitting strangers to the sick man’s room.  During the drive home Kate strove to reassert her old dominion over the moody figure at her side.  It was useless.  As the carriage stopped at the door he turned toward her and said, not unkindly: 

“Daughter, there are some things I know better how to manage than you do.  You have been spying on your father.  This is another count in the long score of grudges I owe the Sprague tribe and their scoundrel son.  Understand me clearly, my child; you must not speak of this matter again.  The whole business will soon be at an end; that end is in my hands, and no power this side the grave can alter a fact in the outcome.  You are very dear to me; you are all I have left in the world; you must trust me, and you must believe that I am doing everything for the best.  Try to think that the world is not coming to an end because I insist on having my own way for once.”

Nothing but the sense of having giving hostages to good behavior rather than honor upheld Kate in the line she had marked out for herself.  She was not, in the modern sense of the word, a strong-minded young woman, this sorely beset champion of the overborne.  She hadn’t even the perversity of the sex in love.  Chivalrously as she loved the lost soldier, she loved her father with that old-fashioned veneration which made her see all that he did with the moral indistinctness, without which there could not be the perfect filial devotion that makes the family a union in good report and evil.  She had not even that, by no means repellent, secondary egoism which upholds us in doing ungrateful things that abstract good may follow.  Opposition, which becomes delightful when we can call it persecution, had no charm for her.  If her father had suddenly adopted the role of the stern parent in novels and ordered her to her chamber, Kate would have regarded it as a joke, and felt rather relieved that she could thus escape the pledge given to the Spragues.  But, as it was, she felt morally bound by her promise to Olympia; and, though she realized dimly that her instrumentality was slowly involving her father in a coil of unloveliness, she resolutely braced herself for the worst.  In spite of herself she had believed in conquering