Kate received flowers, books, and sweets from him, and now and then he asked her why he had lost ground with her.  Sometimes he would say:—­

“I can see a conservative policy is the one for me, Kate, where you’re concerned.  I’m going to lie low so as not to give you a chance to send me whistling.”

Once, when he grew picturesquely melancholy, she refused to receive his offerings.  She told him he was making a villainess out of her, and that she’d end their meetings.  But at that he promised so ardently not to be ardent that she forgave him and continued to read the novels and to tend the flowers he brought her.  They went for walks together; sometimes she lunched with him in the city, and on pleasant evenings they attended open-air concerts.  He tried to be discreet, but in August, with the full moon, he had a relapse.  Kate gave him warning; he persisted,—­the moon really was quite wonderful that August,—­and then, to his chagrin, he received a postcard from Silvertree.  Kate had gone to see her father.

* * * * *

She would not have gone but for a chance word in one of Wander’s letters.

“I hear your father is still living,” he wrote.  “That is so good!  I have no parents now, but I like to remember how happy I was when I had them.  I was young when my mother died, but father lived to a good age, and as long as he was alive I had some one to do things for.  He always liked to hear of my exploits.  I was a hero to him, if I never was to any one else.  It kept my heart warmed up, and when he went he left me very lonely, indeed.”

Kate reddened with shame when she read these words.  Had Honora told him how she had deserted her father—­how she had run from him and his tyranny to live her own life, and was he, Wander, meaning this for a rebuke?  But she knew that could not be.  Honora would have kept her counsel; she was not a tattler.  Karl was merely congratulating her on a piece of good fortune, apparently.  It threw a new light on the declaration of independence that had seemed to her to be so fine.  Was old-time sentiment right, after all?  The ancient law, “Honor thy father and thy mother,” did not put in the proviso, “if they are according to thy notion of what they should be.”

So Kate was again at Silvertree and in the old, familiar and now lifeless house.  It was not now a caressed and pampered home; there was no longer any one there to trick it out in foolish affectionate adornments.  In the first half-hour, while Kate roamed from room to room, she could hardly endure the appalling blankness of the place.  No stranger could have felt so unwelcomed as she did—­so alien, so inconsolably homeless.

She was waiting for her father when he came home, and she hoped to warm him a little by the surprise of her arrival.  But it was his cue to be deeply offended with her.

“Hullo, Kate,” he said, nodding and holding out his hand with a deliberately indifferent gesture.