Kate sprang to her feet incredulously.  There was a moment of waiting so tense that the very trees seemed to cease their moaning to listen.  In all the room there was no sound.  The struggling breath had ceased.  The old physician had been correct—­he had achieved the thing he had set himself to do.  He had announced his own demise.

XXII

Kate had him buried beside the wife for whom he had so inconsistently longed.  She sold the old house, selected a few keepsakes from it, disposed of all else, and came, late in November, back to the city.  Marna’s baby had been born—­a little bright boy, named for his father.  Mrs. Barsaloux, relenting, had sent a layette of French workmanship, and Marna was radiantly happy.

“If only tante will come over for Christmas,” Marna lilted to Kate, “I shall be almost too happy to live.  How good she was to me, and how ungrateful I seemed to her!  Write her to come, Kate, mavourneen.  Tell her the baby won’t seem quite complete till she’s kissed it.”

So Kate wrote Mrs. Barsaloux, adding her solicitation to Marna’s.  Human love and sympathy were coming to seem to her of more value than anything else in the world.  To be loved—­to be companioned—­to have the vast loneliness of life mitigated by fealty and laughter and tenderness—­what was there to take the place of it?

Her heart swelled with a desire to lessen the pain of the world.  All her egotism, her self-assertion, her formless ambitions had got up, or down, to that,—­to comfort the comfortless, to keep evil away from little children, to let those who were in any sort of a prison go free.  Yet she knew very well that all of this would lack its perfect meaning unless there was some one to say to her—­to her and to none other:  “I understand.”

* * * * *

Mrs. Barsaloux did not come to America at Christmas time.  Karl Wander did not—­as he had thought he might—­visit Chicago.  The holiday season seemed to bring little to Kate except a press of duties.  She aspired to go to bed Christmas night with the conviction that not a child in her large territory had spent a neglected Christmas.  This meant a skilled cooeperation with other societies, with the benevolently inclined newspapers, and with generous patrons.  The correspondence involved was necessarily large, and the amount of detail to be attended to more than she should have undertaken, unaided, but she was spurred on by an almost consuming passion of pity and sisterliness.  That sensible detachment which had marked her work at the outset had gradually and perhaps regrettably disappeared.  So far from having outgrown emotional struggle, she seemed now, because of something that was taking place in her inner life, to be increasingly susceptible to it.