Doctor McCall was looking thoughtfully at the floor.  He rose presently and took up his hat:  “The old man cannot have been unhappy with such love as you could give him.  No man could.”

Kitty was sitting, as usual, on a low stool pasting labels on some dog-eared books:  as long as McCall stood looking at her round cheeks and double chin she pasted on, apparently unconscious that he was there, but when he turned away she watched him shrewdly as he went uneasily up and down the shop, and finally, with a curt good-bye, turned out of the door.  As the stout figure passed through the low branches of the walnuts her gray eyes began to shine.  Her Mystery was nearly solved.

Dropping paste and books in a heap, she ran after him, taking a short cut through the currant bushes, so that when he passed on the outer side of the garden fence there she was quietly waiting, her head and face darkly framed by a thick creeper.

“Well?” smiling down, amused, as he might to a playful kitten.

“Doctor McCall,” in the queer formal fashion that was Kitty’s own, “I should be glad if you would come back this evening.  Without Maria.  I have some business—­that is, a plan of mine.  Well, it is a certain thing that—­”

“That you wish to consult me about?” after waiting for her to finish.

“Yes, that’s it,” nodding energetically.

“Very well.”  He stood looking at her arm on the fence, and the face resting with its chin upon it.  McCall, of all men, hated a scene, and he had an uneasy consciousness that he had just betrayed unexplained feeling in the house, and was therefore glad to slip back to commonplaces.  Besides, Kitty was exactly the kind of woman whom all men feel an insane desire to help at first sight.  “You have a plan, eh? and you want advice, not knowing much about business?”

There was not the least necessity for him to say this, having asked it before.  But he did it, and waited to hear Kitty say yes again, and waited still, before he lifted his hat and said good-bye, to see the shadow of a waving branch creep over her white chin and lose itself in her neck.  Most men would have done the same, just as they would stop to whistle a laugh from a fat, pretty baby on the street, and then go on, leaving it behind.  The last thing in the world to consult on their business, or to ask for help or comfort when trouble met them, or death.

* * * * *

Miss Muller spent the whole day at the Book-house, but Doctor McCall did not come, as she expected.  As evening approached she began to shiver, and had premonitory symptoms of clairvoyance, and went home at last, to Kitty’s relief.  A slow drizzling rain set in:  the damp fogs that belong to that river-bottom walled in the house and hung flat over the walnuts like a roof.  Catharine had made her own corner of the Book-shop snug and cheerful.  The space was wide, the light soft and bright.