g back the table and rising, "when I heard that, I
meant to go and find Hugh Guinness, and bring him back to his father."

Whatever this matter might be to her hearer, it was the most real
thing in life to Catharine, and putting it into words gave it a sudden
new force. She felt that she ought to hold her tongue, but she could
not. She only knew that the lighted room, the beating of the rain
without, the watchful guarded face on the other side of the table,
shook and frightened and angered her unaccountably.

"You should not laugh at me," she said. "This is the first work I ever
set myself to do. It is better than nursing three hundred children."

"I am not laughing at you, God knows! But this Guinness, if he be
alive, remains away voluntarily. There must be a reason for that. You
do not consider."

"I do not care to consider. Is the man a log or a stone? If I found
him," crossing the room in her heat until she stood beside him--"if
I brought him to the old house and to his father? Why, look at this!"
dragging open the drawer and taking out the broken gun and rod. "See
what he has kept for years--all that was left him of his boy! Look,
at that single hair! If Hugh Guinness stood where you do, and touched
these things as you are touching them, could he turn his back on the
old man?"

Now, Doctor McCall did not touch gun nor cap nor hair, but he bent
over the table, looking at them as if he were looking at the dead. He
seemed to have forgotten that Kitty was there.

At last he stood upright: "Poor little chap!" with a laugh. "There
seemed to be no reason, when he went gunning and fishing like other
boys, why he should not stand here to-day with as fair a chance for
happiness as any other man. Did there? Just a trifling block laid in
his way, a push down hill, and no force could ever drag him up again."

Kitty, her eyes on his, stood silent. Do what he would, he could not
shake off her eyes: they wrenched the truth from him, "I knew this man
Guinness once," he said.

She nodded: "Yes, I know you did."

"Sit down beside me here, and I will tell you what kind of man he
was."

But she did not sit down. An unaccountable terror or timidity seemed
to have paralyzed her. She looked aside--everywhere but in his face:
"I wanted you to tell me how to reach him, how to touch him: I know
what manner of man he is."

"You have heard from your mother? A mixed Border Pike and
Mephistopheles, eh? The devil and his victim roll