“Yes, that is it.”

“Oui! vare good.  Dat I must inseest on,” said Perritaut.

“Well, I a’n’t nothin’ in a religious way, but I can’t stan’ that air.  I’m too well raised.  I kin marry a Injin, but to sell out my children afore they’re born to Catholic priests, I couldn’t do that air ef you planked down two ten thousands.”

And upon this point Dave stuck.  There is a sentiment down somewhere in almost any man, and there was this one point of conscience with Dave.  And there was likewise this one scruple with Perritaut.  And these opposing scruples in two men who had not many, certainly, turned the scale and gave the county-seat to Metropolisville, for Dave told all his Southern Illinois friends that if the county-seat should remain at Perritaut, the Catholics would build a nunnery an’ a caythedral there, and then none of their daughters would be safe.  These priests was a-lookin’ arter the comin’ generation.  And besides, Catholics and Injins wouldn’ have a good influence on the moral and religious kerecter of the kyounty.  The influence of half-breeds was a bad thing fer civilization.  Ef a man was half-Injin, he was half-Injin, and you couldn’t make him white noways.  And Dave distributed freely deeds to some valueless outlots, which Plausaby had given him for the purpose.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE RETURN.

As long as he could, Charlton kept Katy at Glenfield.  He amused her by every means in his power; he devoted himself to her; he sought to win her away from Westcott, not by argument, to which she was invulnerable, but by feeling.  He found that the only motive that moved her was an emotion of pity for him, so he contrived to make her estimate his misery on her account at its full value.  But just when he thought he had produced some effect there would come one of Smith Westcott’s letters, written not as he talked (it is only real simpleheartedness or genuine literary gift that can make the personality of the writer felt in a letter), but in a round business hand with plenty of flourishes, and in sentences very carefully composed.  But he managed in his precise and prim way to convey to Katy the notion that he was pining away for her company.  And she, missing the giggle and the playfulness from the letter, thought his distress extreme indeed.  For it would have required a deeper sorrow than Smith Westcott ever felt to make him talk in the stiff conventional fashion in which his letters were composed.

And besides Westcott’s letters there were letters from her mother, in which that careful mother never failed to tell how Mr. Westcott had come in, the evening before, to talk about Katy, and to tell her how lost and heart-broken he was.  So that letters from home generally brought on a relapse of Katy’s devotion to her lover.  She was cruelly torn by alternate fits of loving pity for poor dear Brother Albert on the one hand, and poor, dear, dear