It rained during the night.  The wind blew feebly in the morning, and the sunlight glimmered dully from behind the flying gray clouds.  Catharine looked out of her window, anxiously pushing aside the boughs full of wet white roses.  The sense of desolation was not strong enough upon her to make her forget that Peter had not yet cut the clover in the lower meadow, and that such a rain was bad for the tomatoes.  Doctor McCall was at the gate, propping up an old Bourbon rose, an especial favorite of her father’s.  Somebody tapped at her door, and Miss Muller rustled in in a flounced white muslin and rose-colored ribbons.  She too hurried to the window and looked down.

“I asked him to meet me here, Kitty.  I can’t make you understand, probably, but the Water-cure House is so bald and bare!  There is something in the shade here, and the old books, and this wilderness of roses, that forms a fitting background for a friendship like ours, aesthetically considered.”

“I’m very glad.  It’s lucky I told Jane to have waffles—­”

“I’ll go down,” interrupted Miss Muller, “and direct her about the table.  Coarse tablecloths and oily butter would jar against the finest emotions.  What very pretty shoulders you have, child!  Such women as you, like potatoes, are best au naturel.  Now, with those corsets, and this red shawl over the back of your chair, you would make a very good Madonna of the Rubens school.  Men’s ideal of womanhood then was to be plump, insipid and a mother.”

“But about the oily butter?” said Kitty, glancing back over the aforesaid shoulders as she stooped to lace her shoes, while Maria hurried off to the kitchen.  “Jane will jar against her finer emotions, I fancy, when she begins to order her about.”

But Kitty lost all relish for fun before she sat down to the breakfast-table.  Mr. Muller came in.  The poor little man hurried to her side:  “I passed a sleepless night, Catharine.  I feared that I had been rough with you.  I forget so often how gentle and tender you are, my darling.”

Catharine was puzzled:  “Upon my word, I’ve forgotten what happened.  And I really never feel especially gentle or tender.  You are mistaken about that.”

When she took her place behind the urn, Maria motioned her brother to the foot of the table, and then nodded significantly.  “Now you two can imagine a month or two has passed,” she said.

Even Doctor McCall smiled meaningly.  Mr. Muller blushed, and glanced shyly at Catharine.  But she looked at him unmoved.  “Our table will not be like this,” gravely.  “You forget the three hundred blue-coats between.”  Maria laughed, but Doctor McCall for the first time looked steadily at the girl.

First of all, perhaps, Kitty was just then a housekeeper.  She waited anxiously to see if the steak was properly rare and the omelette light, nodded brightly to Jane, who stood watchful behind her, and then looked over at her betrothed, thinking how soon they would sit down tete-a-tete for the rest of their lives, perhaps for eternity, for, according to her orthodoxy, there could be no new loves in heaven.  How fat he was, and bald!  The mild blue eyes behind their glasses took possession of her and held her.