CHAPTER III.

Her mother scanned Catharine when she came in as she had never done before.  She was “taking stock” of her, so to speak:  she wished to know what was in the girl to have secured this lover, or what there was to hold him should he ever hear Hugh’s damning story.  Her eye ran over her.  She was able to hold her motherly fondness aside while she judged her.  Kitty was flushed and awakened from head to foot with the excitement of this single visitor.

“At her age,” thought Mrs. Guinness, “I could have faced a regiment of lovers.  Kitty’s weak:  I always felt her brain was small—­small.  She has nothing of my face, or address either.  There’s no beauty there but youth, and her curious eyes.”  She never had been sure whether she admired Kitty’s eyes or not.

But clergymen and reformers were as vulnerable as other men to soft, flushing cheeks and moist lips, and Mr. Muller, as she judged from his agitation, was no wiser than the rest.  He pressed nervously forward, bridging his nose with his eye-glasses.

“Catharine, my child, will you walk out with me?  I wish to consult you on a little matter.”

“Oh, with pleasure,” said Kitty.

Her mother stood aghast.  Like the mass of women, she viewed the matter of love from the sentimental, L.E.L. stand-point.  It had been a forbidden subject to Kitty.  Her heart her mother supposed, slept, like the summer dawn, full of dreams, passion, dewy tenderness, waiting for the touch of the coming day.  What kind of awakening would the plump “Will you marry me?” of this fat little clergyman be?  In the street of Berry town, too! in the middle of the afternoon!  If it were only moonlight!

“Pray wait until evening, Catharine:  you’re always famished for your supper,” she cried anxiously.

“But I’m not hungry now at all,” running up the stairs.  For politeness’ sake Kitty would lie with a smile on her mouth though a fox were gnawing at her stomach.  Something in her running reminded Mr. Muller that she was a school-girl and he a middle-aged noted reformer.  He fidgeted about the room, looking at the prints of La Fayette and Franklin on the whitewashed wall, and the Tomb of Washington done in faded chenilles by Mr. Guinness’s first wife, buttoning his gloves with an anxious frown.

“I’m sure I don’t know what my sister Maria will say to this,” after one or two uneasy laughs.  “I never mean to be eccentric, yet somehow I always am different from anybody else.  Now, in church-matters—­I never intended to leave the orthodox communion, yet when I showed how my Church was clinging to worn-out dogmas, and opened my Reformatory in Berrytown, the Free-Religionists in Boston seized me, and printed my opening sermon under one cover with that of an Oneidaite and a Spiritualist.  Do I look like a medium or a Free-Lover?  That was going a little too far, I take it.”