I would have to play out my game full heartedly, nursing my powers of belief back to their one-time vigor; nothing would occur to ease my lot—­not even an occasion to pretend that I gave my blessing to a reunited and happy pair.  Miss Kate could go on believing.  Unwittingly I had given her the stuff for belief.  I, too, must go on believing, and providing my own material, as had ever been my lot; all of which was why my dog seemed my most profitable companion at this time.  His every bark at a threatening baby-carriage a block away, each fresh time he believed sincerely that a rubber shoe was engaging in deadly struggle with him, taxing all his forces to subdue it, each time he testified with sensitive, twitching nostrils that the earth is good with innumerable scents, each streaking of his glad-tongued white length over yellowing fields designed solely for his recreation held for me a certain soothing value.  And when in quiet moments he assured me with melting gaze that I was a being to challenge the very heart of love—­in some measure, at least, did my soul gain strength from his own.

To know as much as I have indicated had been unavoidable for one of any intuitive powers.  The change at once to be detected in Miss Kate’s manner toward me confirmed my divinations without enlarging them.  Miss Katharine Lansdale was gone forever; in her place was a Miss Kate,—­even a Little Miss to the eye,—­who regarded me at first with an undisguised alarm, then with a curious interfusion of alarm and shyness, a little disguised with not a little effort.  This was plain reading.  She would at first have distrusted me, apprehending I know not what rashness of ill-timed and forever impossible declarations.  As she perceived this alarm to be baseless, for I not only refrained from intruding but I ostentatiously let Miss Kate alone, shyness would creep into her apprehension to make amends for its first crude manifestations.

As the days went by and I displayed still the fine sense to keep myself aloof, to seek Miss Kate only in those ways that I sought her refreshing mother, she let me discern more clearly her faith in my firmness and good sense.  To be plain, in reward for letting her alone, she did not let me alone.  And this reward I accepted becomingly, with a resolve—­the metal of which I hoped she would divine—­never to show myself undeserving of its benisons.

When I say that the young woman did not let me alone, I mean that she seemed almost to put herself in my way; not obviously, true enough, but in a degree palpable enough to one who had observed her first almost shrinking alarm.  And this behavior of hers went forward, at last, without the slightest leaven of apprehension on her part, but her shyness remained.  It was so marked and so novel in her—­with reference to myself—­that I could not fail to be sensible to it.  It was as if she divined that mad notions might still lurk within my untaught mind to be reasons why she should fear me; but that her confidence in my self-mastery could not, at the same time, be too openly shown.