Now, Doctor McCall did not touch gun nor cap nor hair, but he bent over the table, looking at them as if he were looking at the dead.  He seemed to have forgotten that Kitty was there.

At last he stood upright:  “Poor little chap!” with a laugh.  “There seemed to be no reason, when he went gunning and fishing like other boys, why he should not stand here to-day with as fair a chance for happiness as any other man.  Did there?  Just a trifling block laid in his way, a push down hill, and no force could ever drag him up again.”

Kitty, her eyes on his, stood silent.  Do what he would, he could not shake off her eyes:  they wrenched the truth from him, “I knew this man Guinness once,” he said.

She nodded:  “Yes, I know you did.”

“Sit down beside me here, and I will tell you what kind of man he was.”

But she did not sit down.  An unaccountable terror or timidity seemed to have paralyzed her.  She looked aside—­everywhere but in his face:  “I wanted you to tell me how to reach him, how to touch him:  I know what manner of man he is.”

“You have heard from your mother?  A mixed Border Pike and Mephistopheles, eh?  The devil and his victim rolled into one?” He shifted his heavy body uneasily, glancing toward the door.  Chief among the graver secret emotions which she had roused in him was the momentary annoyance of not knowing how to deal with this chicken-hearted little girl before him, scared, but on fire from head to foot.

Kitty was quite confident.  If it had been Maria Muller who had thus set herself to tamper with a man’s life, she would have done it trembling, with fear and self-distrust.  She had brains which could feel and react against the passions she evoked, and were competent to warn her of the peril of her work.  But as for Kitty—­

Here was Hugh Guinness before her, a Cain with the curse of God upon him.  It was clearly her business to bring him back again to his father, and afterward convert him into a member of the church, if possible.  She went about the work with as little doubt as if it had been the making of a pudding.

But she was shy, tender, womanly withal.  Doctor McCall laughed as he looked down at her, and spoke deliberately, as though giving his opinion of a patient to another physician.  “I’ll tell you honestly my opinion of Hugh Guinness.  He was, first of all, a thoroughly ordinary, commonplace man, with neither great virtues nor great vices, nor force of any kind.  If he had had that, he could have recovered himself when he began to fall.  But he did not recover himself.”

“What drove him down in the first place?”

He hesitated:  “I suppose that his home and religion became hateful to him.  Boys have unreasonable prejudices at times.”

“And then, in despair—­”

“Despair?  Nonsense!  Now don’t figure to yourself a romantic Hotspur of a fellow rushing into hell because heaven’s gate was shut on him.  At nineteen Hugh Guinness drank and fought and gambled, as other ill-managed boys do to work off the rank fever of blood.  Unfortunately—­” he stopped, and then added in a lower voice, quickly, “he made a mistake while the fever was on him which was irretrievable.”