behind its walnut trees, its yellow walls clammy with lichen, was undeniably a blot, the sole sign of age and conservatism in a landscape which, from horizon to horizon, Reform swept with the newest of brooms.  No wonder that the Berrytownites looked askance at it, and at the book-fanciers who had haunted the place for years, knowing old Guinness to be the keenest agent they could put upon the trail of a pamphlet or relic.

The old man grew surly sometimes when sorely goaded by the new-comers.  “There’s not a man of them, Kitty,” he would say, “but has ideas; and there’s not an idea in the town five years old.”  But generally he was cordial with them all, going off into rapt admiration of each new prophet as he arose, and he would willingly have stood cheek by jowl with them in their planting and watering and increase if they had not snubbed him from the first.  Book-shops full of old plays, and a man who talked of Scott’s width of imagination and Clay’s statesmanship, were indigestible matter which Berrytown would gladly have spewed out of her mouth.  “What have aimless imagination and temporizing policy to do with the Advancement of Mankind?  Dead weight, sir, dead weight! which but clogs the wheels of the machine.”  Any schoolboy in Berrytown could have so reasoned you the matter.  While Catharine was growing up, therefore, the walnut trees had shut the Guinnesses into complete social solitude until deliverance came in the shape of Mr. Muller.

CHAPTER II.

Besides her supper now, Catharine wanted her share of this visitor.  Nothing else, in fact, came in or went out of her life.  Outside lay emancipated Berrytown, to unemancipated Kitty only a dumb panorama:  inside, her meals, her lessons and perpetual consultations with her mother on bias folds and gussets while they made their dresses or sewed for the Indian missions.  Kitty was quite willing to believe that the Berrytown women were mad and unsexed, but ought the events of life to consist of beef and new dresses and far-off Sioux?  She laughed good-humoredly at her own grumbling, but she looked longingly out of the window at the girls going by chattering in the evenings with their sweet-hearts; and certainly the Man coming into her life had affected her not unpleasantly.  Not that the clergyman, with his small jokes and small enthusiasms, was any high revelation to her mind; but there was no other.

“It’s something to hear a heavy step about the house, and to see the carpet kicked crooked,” she said sometimes.  Her mother would shake her hand gently and smile.

She shook her head and smiled in precisely the same way now.  Mr. Muller, who had grown excited as he talked, felt a wave of insipid propriety wash over his emotions, bringing them to a dead level.

“However the matter may conclude,” said Mrs. Guinness pleasantly, “why should you and I lose our self-control, Mr. Muller?  Now, why should we?  Ah?”