CHAPTER IV.

Meanwhile, Catharine and Mr. Muller walked down the street in absolute silence, Kitty bearing herself with her usual grave politeness, though there was a quizzical laugh in her eyes.  “Lover?  My lover?” she thought.  But she did not blush, as some other innocent girls would have done.  She had never talked an hour in her life to a young man, or heard from other girls their incessant chirping of “he—­he,” like that of birds in spring wooing their mates.  Her nearest acquaintance with lovers was old Peter’s rendering of Romeo or Othello.  She remembered them well enough as her eye furtively ran over the jaunty little figure beside her.  “Is his hose ungartered, his beard neglected, his shoe untied?” she thought.  “Pshaw! he is not Orlando, any more than I am Rosalind.”  Her mother had been mistaken, that was all:  she let the matter slip easily past her.  There was a certain tough common sense in Catharine that summarily sent mistakes and sentimental fancies to the right about.

Mr. Muller, finding the words he wished to speak would not come at once, and ashamed of jogging on in silence, began to overflow with the ordinary ideas of which he was full.  They passed the grape-packing house.  “Eight thousand boxes despatched last season, Catharine!  And there is the Freedmen’s Agency.  Three teachers supported, five hundred primers furnished to Virginia alone since January, and I really forget the number of Bibles.  But the world moves:  yes indeed.  And I think sometimes Berrytown moves in the van.”

“I’ve no doubt of that,” said Kitty politely.  “Dear me!  Five hundred spelling-books!” But she felt humiliated.  She had neither picked grapes nor taught freedmen.  What thin wisps of hair these women had stopping to speak to Mr. Muller!  She put her hand suddenly to the back of her head.

“Those are employees in the canning-house,” he said as they passed on.  “One is educating herself as a short-hand reporter, and the other has a lecture ready for next winter on Shakespeare’s Women.”

“What admirable persons they must be!  Ah! now I have it right!” setting her hat higher on the light chestnut coils.  Mr. Muller looked, and his eye rested there.  She knew that, though the back of her head was toward him.  But lover?  Nonsense!  He meant no doubt to propose that she should go into the typesetting business or stenography.

Now, to tell Kitty’s secret, she had had her love-affair her mother knew nothing about, which made her purblind in this matter.  It was this:  There was a certain cave (originally a spring-house) behind the walnut trees, quite covered over with trumpet-vines and partridge-berries.  She had a bench there, from which she could see only the shady old house and the sun going down.  When she was a child of about eight, alone all day long, year in and out, she had taken down this bench, and working stealthily and blushing terribly, had made it large enough for