CHAPTER V.

Catharine stood a long time by the gate.

“Don’t question the child,” said Peter to her mother.  He would not even look at her when she came in, but fidgeted about, his leathery jaws red as a girl’s at the thought that Kitty loved and was beloved.

“Is supper over?  I’m hungry,” was all she said.  They watched her furtively as she ate.

“It’s prayer-meeting night, Catharine,” said Mrs. Guinness when she was through, taking her bonnet from the closet.

“I’m not going.”

“Mr. Muller will miss you, my dear.”

“Mr. Muller never has enough of prayer-meetings,” recklessly, “but I have.  I prefer going to bed to-night;” and she went up stairs.

Before her mother was gone, however, she began to change her dress, putting on one which, when the cape was not worn, left her shoulders and arms bare.  She shook down her hair after the fashion of a portrait in the book-shop of Kitty Clive, Peg Woffington or some other ancient beauty more amiable than discreet.  There was a delicious flavor of wickedness in the taking out of every hairpin.  Then she came down to Peter where he sat smoking.

“In the dark, father?  I’ll light the candles;” which she did, scolding Jane savagely between-times.  “We’ll have some old plays to-night, father,” bringing a book which her mother had forbidden, and then bringing his sheepskin-lined chair up to the table.  Peter eyed her furtively as he puffed out his cigar to the last ash.  On the stage or in the ball-room he had never seen, he thought, a finer woman than Catharine; and the old man’s taste in beauty or dress or wine had been keen enough when he was a young blood on the town.  He was annoyed and irritable.

“Catharine,” he said sharply “bring your shawl:  the night is chilly.”  But he read the plays with outward good-humor, and with an inward delight and gusto, which he would not betray.  All his youth—­that old Peter Guinness, for whom each day’s bumpers had been frothed so high—­came back in the familiar exits and entrances.  The words were innocent enough as he altered them in reading for Kitty, though a good deal disjointed as to meaning; but she was not critical—­forced herself to take an interest in his stories of Burton and Kean, and how he first saw old Jefferson.

“I suppose,” moving uneasily on her stool at his feet, “that this now is ‘the world, the flesh and the devil!’ But,” viciously snapping her eyes, “I like it, I like it!  I wish I could think of something else to do.”

In the middle of Peter’s croaking of “Poor Yarico,” to show her how Catalani sang it on the London boards, she jumped up and went to the window.  People were coming home from prayer-meeting, husbands and wives together.

“I suppose every woman must marry, father?” she said.

Peter looked doubtfully at her over his spectacles, opened his mouth and shut it once or twice.  “I judge that is the highest lot for a woman,” he said slowly, “to be the wife of a good man.”