force and attraction in their most petty actions and words, to which men yield.  Miss Muller could have watched Kitty all day dragging chairs and trimming lamps, unmoved farther than to pronounce her little better than an idiot.  But Peter, Muller or John McCall could not look at her for five minutes without classing her with Cordelia and Desdemona and all the other sweet fools for whom men have died, and whom the world yet keeps sacred in pathetic memory.  Some day too, when Catharine should be a mother—­though giving to her older children, little more than to the baby on her breast, soft touches and gentle words—­she would bind them to her as no other kind, of mother could do—­by such bonds that until they were gray-haired no power should be like hers.  Miss Muller neither saw nor foresaw such things.  But Doctor McCall did.  “If I had had such a mother I should not have been what I am,” he thought.  It was a curious fancy to have about a young girl.  But she seemed to embody all the womanliness that had been lacking in his life.  Of course she was nothing to him.  She was to be that prig Muller’s wife, and he was quite satisfied that she should be.  If he married, Maria Muller would be his wife.  Yet, oddly enough, he felt to-night, for the first time, the necessity that Maria should know how marriage was barred out from him, and felt, for the first time, too, a maddening anger that it was so barred.  However, Doctor McCall was never meant by Nature for a solitary man housed alone with morbid thoughts:  he was the stuff out of which useful citizens are made—­John Andersons of husbands, doting, gullible fathers.

Remembering the bar in his life, his skeleton, ghost or whatever it was, he was only moved to get up and stretch himself, saying, “I’ve stayed in Berrytown too long.  When you have told me your plan, I’ll say good-bye to you, Miss Vogdes, and this old house.  I shall be off to-morrow.”

Kitty had just caught a moth in the flame of the candle.  She carried it to the window.  “You will come back soon, of course?” her back still toward him.

“No, I think not.  I am neglecting my business.  And I, of all men in the world, have least right to loiter about this old house, to look in on its home-life or on you.”

Kitty gave him a sharp glance, as though some sudden emergency was clear before her which her tact failed to meet.  She was folding the bits of muslin at which she had been sewing in a basket:  she finished slowly, put the basket away, and sat down at the table, with her elbow on it and her chin on her hand, her gray eyes suggesting a deeper and unspoken meaning to her words:  “But for my plan?”

“Ah! to be sure!  You want advice?” seating himself comfortably.  Her confusion was a pretty thing to watch, the red creeping up her neck into her face, blotting out its delicate tints, the uncertain glances, the full bitten lip.  Doctor McCall quite forgot his own trouble in the keen pleasure of the sight.