a cruel sliver from her hand, kissing the place to make it well as she told him to.  She was a child then, a little girl of twelve, and he was twenty, but the sight of her pure face lifted confidingly to his had stirred his heart as no other face had stirred it since, making him look forward to a time when the hand he kissed would be his own, and his the fairy form he watched so carefully as it expanded day by day into the perfect woman.  He was thinking of that time now, and how different it had all turned out, when he heard the bounding step and saw her coming toward him, swinging her hat in childish abandon, and warbling a song she had learned from him.

“Morris, oh, Morris!” she cried, as she ran eagerly forward; “I am so glad to see you.  It seems so nice to be with you once more here in the dear old woods.  Don’t get up—­please don’t get up,” she continued, as he started to rise.

She was standing before him, a hand on either side of his face, into which she was looking quite as wistfully as he was regarding her.  Something she missed in his manner, something which troubled her; and thinking she knew what it was, she said to him:  “Why don’t you kiss me, Morris?  You used to.  Ain’t you glad to see me?”

“Yes, very glad,” he answered, and drawing her down to the bench beside him, he kissed her twice, but so gravely, so quietly, that Katy was not satisfied at all, and tears gathered in her eyes as she tried to think what it was ailed Morris.

He was very thin, and there were a few white hairs about his temples, so that, though four years younger than her husband, he seemed to her much older, quite grandfatherly in fact, and this accounted for the liberties she took, asking what was the matter, and trying to make him like her again, by assuring him that she was not as vain and foolish as he must suppose from what Helen had probably told him of her life since leaving Silverton.

“I do not like it at all,” she said.  “I am in it, and must conform; but, oh Morris! you don’t know how much happier I should be if Wilford were just like you, and lived at Linwood instead of New York.  I should be so happy here with baby all the time.”

It was well she spoke that name, for Morris, listening to her as she charged him with indifference, could not have borne much more; but the mention of her child had a strange power over him, of quieting him at once, so that he could calmly tell her that she was the same to him that she had always been, while with his next breath he asked:  “Where is your baby, Katy?” adding with a smile:  “I can remember when you were a baby, and I held you in my arms.”

“Can you really?” Katy said; and as if that remembrance made him older than the hills, she nestled her curly head against his shoulder, while she told him of her bright-eyed darling, and as she talked the mother-love which spread itself over her girlish face made it more beautiful than anything Morris had ever seen.