“Oh, God! oh, my God!  I want to do what’s right!” cried Kitty silently, looking away to the farthest horizon.

Mr. Muller remembered by this time some of his long-planned endearing speeches, and used them.  But he could not bring a blush to her cheek.  She did presently look straight at him, her eye passing quickly and critically over the neat paunchy little figure in its fashionably-cut coat and tight-fitting trowsers.  When she was a girl of ten she had fancied that Dr. Brownlee would be her future husband—­the actual Sir Guy.  She would listen Sunday after Sunday to the gray-bearded old fellow dealing the thunders of Sinai from the pulpit overhead, in a rapt delight, thinking how sweet it would be to be guided step by step by so holy and great a man.  Long after she grew out of that, indeed only a year or two ago, she used to tremble and grow hot to her finger-tips when young Herr Bluhm, the music-master, went by the gate.  A nod of his curly bullet head or the tramp of his sturdy cowskin boots along the road made her nerves tingle as never before.  “What was this that ailed her?” she had asked herself a dozen times a day.  All Mr. Muller’s love-making did not move her now as one note of Bluhm’s voluntaries on the organ had done.  She had thought him Mendelssohn and Mozart in one:  the tears came now, thinking of that divine music.  But one day Mrs. Guinness had brought him in, being a phrenologist, to “feel Kitty’s head.”  She felt the astonished indignation yet which stunned her from his thick thumb and fore finger as they gripped and fumbled over her head as if she had been a log of wood.  But what could poor Bluhm know of the delicate fancies about himself in her brain as he measured it, which his heavy paws, smelling of garlic and tobacco, were putting to flight?  “Philoprogenitiveness—­whew! this little girl will be fond of children, madam.  Tune, time!—­has no more notion of music than a frog.”

“At least,” thought Catharine now, “Mr. Muller is a gentleman.  I shall never feel disgust for him.”

They had reached the gate now.  He waited.  “I shall not come in.  I’ve confused and startled you, Catharine.  You want time to think,” he said gently.

“I understand, oh, I quite understand.  But I never thought of myself as your wife,” she said quietly.  “It would be better you gave me time.”

“Good-bye, then, my—­my darling.”

“Good-bye.”

She stood looking over the gate, the walnut branches dark overhead, a level ray of sunlight on her strange alluring eyes and full bosom.  Mr. Muller lingered, smoothing his hat before he put it on.

“She has not at all the intellectual power of Maria,” he thought.  “Maria’s the sort of woman I ought to have chosen, I suppose,” being a reformer, first of all, in the very grain.  But the silly thought of holding her hand or kissing her lips came to him at the moment, and tormented him thereafter with a feverish desire.