“You mean that there must be no—­no marriage?”

“No.  I’m very sorry.  It has been my fault.  But I thought—­”

“You thought you loved me, and you do not.  Don’t cry, Kitty.”

A long silence followed, which seemed to Catharine like that of death.  It was noticeable that he did not make a single effort to change her resolution or to keep her.  It seemed as if he must have been waiting for her to waken some day and see the gulf between them.

“Don’t cry, Kitty,” he said again, under his breath.  He stood by the empty fireplace, resting his dainty foot on the fender and looking down on it:  he took out his handkerchief, shook out its folds and wiped his face, which was hot and parched.  Kitty was sorry, as she said—­sorry and scared, as though she had been called on to touch the corpse of one dear to her friends, but whose death cost her nothing.  That she was breaking an obligation she had incurred voluntarily troubled her very little.

“Yes, I thought you would say this one day,” he said at last.  “I think you are right to take care of yourself.  I was too old a man for you to marry.  But I would have done all I could.  I have been very fond of you,” looking at her.

“Yes.  You never seemed old to me sir.”

“And your work for the poor children?  I thought, dear, you felt that the Lord called you to that?”

“So I did.  But I don’t think I feel it so much to-day.”  Catharine’s eyes were wide with this new terror.  Was she, then, turning her back on her God?

She was, after all, he thought, nothing but a frightened, beautiful child.

“I should have been too rough for you,” he said.  How was he to suspect the heights from which she had looked down on his softness and flippancy?

She observed that he said not a word of the preparations he had made, the house furnished, the expectant congregation, or the storm of gossip and scandal which would follow him as a jilted lover.  Was the real wound, then, so deep?  Or did he overlook such trifles, as men do?

“I did not forget the new dresses and underclothes,” thought Kitty, mean and mortified.

He roused himself as Jane came in:  “No, Jane, no more tea.  Yes, that is my cup on the mantel-shelf.”

“Dah’s a gen’leman, Miss Kitty.  I took him in the Book-shop.  ’T mought be Spellissy ’bout de oats.  Tink it is Spellissy.”

“You had better go, Catharine,” taking up his hat.

“It is not important.”  The door closed after Jane.  She came close to him, irresolute.  What could she say?  She thought, with the heat of childishness, that she would give the blood out of her body, drop by drop, to comfort him.  She wished that she had gone on and married him.  “But I cannot say that I love him.”  This was a matter for life and death—­even Kitty’s polite soul recognized that—­and not for a civil lie.

Again the man asserted himself before the woman:  “No, there is nothing for you to say, Catharine,” smiling.  “There are some things it is better not to varnish over with words.”  He took up his hat after a pause, and turned a feeble, uncertain face to the window:  “I—­I might as well go now:  I have a prayer-meeting this afternoon.”