she
occupied a place quite unique in his heart. And she loved passionately
to be loved, this hypocrite of a Madigan, who jeered and jibed at any
demonstration of affection. A sense of being utterly at harmony with the
world possessed her now; the fact that she was "showing off" was far,
far in the background of her consciousness, when all at once she
happened to glance out through the hall door.

She had left it ajar behind her, expecting Kate to follow her in. But
Kate, evidently, had not followed. She stood out there alone with Mr.
Garvan, her arms behind her, her slender figure drawn up beneath the
swinging hall lamp, her pert little head, circled by the braids she wore
coiled clear around it when she wanted to be very grown-up, upturned to
the master, her every feature stamped with coquetry.

Sissy shut her lips firmly--and the wrong note she struck marred the
doctor's finale. It was evident that Kate Madigan needed looking after.

* * * * *

She did; and yet no one but Kate and those she experimented upon could
help her to find herself.

A wilful Madigan, intoxicated with her first taste of a new pleasure,
was Kate. She had outgrown her short skirts with regret; she was
preparing to make them still longer with delight. She had the maturity
of her motherless and quasi-fatherless state to add to the natural
precocity of the mining-town girl, and of the eldest sister who has been
pushed out of her childhood by the press of numbers behind her. And yet
the wine of romance kept her almost babyishly young. She had a way of
proclaiming the fact that she read everything her father did. (Madigan,
marooned by his misfortunes in the most picturesque setting, where men
were living the most picturesque lives, turned his back upon it all and
found the action his dull days were denied in the elder Dumas.) By this
Kate intended to show how proud and unrestrained a Madigan was; hoped,
too, perhaps, that there might attach a bit--the least bit--of
suggestive license to the phrase. And all the while she was pitiably
unconscious of how innocuous the old romanticist's tales of adventure
may be, read in translation, by the light of such purity and innocence
as hers.

But she was pert, was Kate, and piquant; she presumed upon her youth,
upon her age. She was a child when you expected her to be a woman, and a
woman where you looked for the child. No dream of romance was romantic
enough to hold her fic