“He will follow you home to Berrytown, then?” for the chaplain was but a man, and his curiosity was roused to know the exact relation between McCall and this old-fashioned, lovable girl.

Kitty hesitated:  “I think he will come to Berrytown again.  There is some business there which his wife’s death will leave him free now to attend to.”

She went to a sofa and sat down:  “I shall be glad to be at home,” beginning to cry.  “I want to see father.”

“Broke down utterly,” the chaplain told his wife, “as soon as her terrible work was done.”

As for Kitty, it seemed to her that her work in life and death was over for ever.

“You must come back,” she said when McCall put her in the cars, looking like a ghost of herself.  “Your father will be wanting to see you.  And—­and Maria.”

“Maria?  What the deuce is Maria to me?”

It was no ghost of Kitty that came home that evening.  The shy, lively color came and went unceasingly, and her eyes sparkled.

“Poor Maria!” she whispered to her pillow as she went to bed—­“poor Maria!”

CHAPTER XV.

It was a long time before he came.  Months afterward, one evening when the express-train rushed into the depot, Catharine went down through the walnut trees into the garden.  She stopped in the shadow as a man’s figure crossed the fields.  The air was cool—­it was early spring.  The clouds in the west threw the Book—­house into shadow.  Hugh Guinness, coming home, could see the narrow-paned windows twinkling behind the walnut boughs.  It was just as he had left it when he was a boy.  There was the cow thrusting her head through a break in the fence he had made himself; the yellow-billed ducks quacked about the pond he had dug in the barnyard; the row of lilacs by the orchard fence were just in blossom:  they were always the latest on the farm, he remembered.  He saw Kitty, like the heart of his old home, waiting for him.  Her white dress and the hair pushed back from her face gave her an appearance of curious gentleness and delicacy.

When he came to her he took both her hands in his.

“You will come to your father now?” she said, frightened and pale.

They walked side by side down the thick rows of young saplings.  There was a cool bank overgrown with trumpet-creeper.  Inside, he caught sight of a little recess or cave, and a gray old bench on which was just room for two.

“Will you stop here and sit down one moment?” she said.

It was nothing to him but a deserted spring-house.  It was the one enchanted spot of Kitty’s life.

Half an hour afterward they found old Peter playing on his violin at the doorstep.  Kitty had often planned an effective bringing back of Hugh to him, but she forgot it all, and creeping up put her hands about his neck.  “Father! look there, father!” she whispered.