For her father was passing.  His weakness increased, and his attitude toward life became one of gentle indifference.  He was homesick for his wife, too.  Though he had seemed to take so little satisfaction in her society, and had not scrupled when she was alive to show the contempt he felt for her opinions, now he liked to talk of her.  He had made a great outcry against sentiment all of his life, but in his weakness he found his chief consolation in it.  He had been a materialist, denying immortality for the soul, but now he reverted to the phrases of pious men of the past generation.

“I shall be seeing your mother soon, Kate,” he would say wistfully, holding his daughter’s hand.  Kate was involuntarily touched by such words, but she was ashamed for him, too.  Where was all his hard-won, bravely flaunted infidelity?  Where his scientific outlook?

It was only slowly, and as the result of her daily and nightly association with him, that she began to see how his acquired convictions were slipping away from him, leaving the sentiments and predilections which had been his when he was a boy.  Had he never been a strong man, really, and had his violence of opinion and his arrogance of demeanor been the defences erected by a man of spiritual timidity and restless, excitable brain?  Had his assertiveness, like his compliance, been part and parcel of a mind not at peace, not grounded in a definite faith?  Perhaps he had been afraid of the domination of his gentle wife with her soft insistence, and had girded at her throughout the years because of mere fanatic self-esteem.  But now that she had so long been beyond the reach of his whimsical commands, he turned to the thought of her like a yearning child to its mother.

“If you hadn’t come when you did, Kate,” he would say, weeping with self-pity, “I should have died alone.  I wouldn’t own to any one how sick I was.  Why, one night I was so weak, after being out thirty-six hours with a sick woman, that I had to creep upstairs on my hands and knees.”  He sobbed for a moment piteously, his nerves too tattered to permit him to retain any semblance of self-control.  Kate tried in vain to soothe him.  “What would your mother have thought if you had let me die alone?” he demanded of her.

It was useless for her to say that he had not told her he was ill.  He was in no condition to face the truth.  He was completely shattered—­the victim of a country physician’s practice and of an unrestrained irritability.  Her commiseration had been all that was needed to have him yield himself unreservedly to her care.

It had been her intention to stay in the woods with him for a fortnight, but the end of that time found his lassitude increasing and his need for her greater than ever.  She was obliged to ask for indefinite leave of absence.  A physician came from Milwaukee once a week to see him; and meantime quiet and comfort were his best medicines.