“And when you go you mean never to come back again?” cried Kitty, pale and red in a moment.  “That’s to be the end of it all?”

“What more can there be?  It’s all said.”  Yet after he had walked to the door he stood on the steps, looking about the room which had grown so familiar and dear to him.  At Kitty he did not look.

“Will you have a rose?” breaking one hastily from the trailing branches at the window.  “To remember the old Book-shop.”  She had never given him anything before.

He threw it down:  “I do not need a rose to make me remember,” bitterly.  “It is all said, child?  You have nothing to tell me?” looking furtively at her.

For a long time she did not speak:  “No, nothing.”

“Good-bye, Kitty.”

Kitty did not answer him.  The tears ran hot and salt over her round cheeks as she watched the little man disappear through the walnuts.  She went up stairs, and, still crying, chose one or two maudlin sonnets and a lock of black hair as mementoes to keep of him.  She did keep them as long as she lived, and used frequently to sigh over them with a sentimental tenderness which the real Muller never had won from her.

CHAPTER XII.

Miss Muller’s message was never delivered, but Doctor McCall did not leave Berrytown that morning.  Going down the road, he had caught sight of the old Book-house, and Kitty in her pink wrapper at the window.  He overheard Symmes, the clerk at the station, say to some lounger that Peter Guinness would be at home that day or the next.  He took his valise to the baggage-room.

“My business is not pressing,” he said to Symmes.  “No need to be off until this evening.”

Perhaps he could see the old man, himself unseen, he thought with a boyish choking in his throat.  He could surely give one more day to the remembrance of that old sweet, hearty boy’s life without wronging the wretched ghost of a wife whose hand clutched so much away from him.

Miss Muller, seeing him on the bridge from the windows of her room, supposed her message had been given:  “He has stayed to know how he may win me.”  For the first time she faced the riddle squarely.  In the morning she had only wished weakly to keep him beside her.

He was married.  Popular novels offered recipes by the score for the cure of such difficulties in love.  But Maria was no reader of novels.  Out of a strict Calvinistic family she and her brother had leaped into heterodoxy—­William to pause neatly poised on the line where Conventionalism ended; Maria to flounder in an unsounded quagmire, which she believed the well of Truth.  Five years ago she would have felt her chance of salvation in danger if she had spoken to a woman who persisted in loving a married man.  But five years work strange changes in the creeds of young women now-a-days; and Maria’s heart was choosing her creed for her to-day, according to the custom of her sex.