n; and he was the son of a convict to boot.
Was it likely that he would ask in marriage the hand of one of the young
heiresses of Storm? How stupid she had been!

"Bless the boy! I'll have to take this thing in hand myself," thought
Kate Kildare, glad of an excuse, and turned her horse's head toward the
rectory.

Philip, absorbed in putting final touches to his next day's sermon,
looked up from his desk to see her smiling in at the door of the room
that was his study, his dining-room and his parlor combined.

He sprang to his feet. "You!" he cried, with a look in his eyes that
might have told its own story to a woman less accustomed to appreciative
male glances. "I--I was just thinking of you."

That was true enough. She would have found it difficult to come upon him
at a time when he was not thinking of her, somewhere in the back of his
mind. Lately, whenever he had been with Jacqueline, the girl reminded
him so constantly, so almost poignantly, of her mother that sometimes he
caught himself speaking to her in the very voice he used with his lady,
a softer, deeper voice that was the unconscious expression of the inmost
man. His congregation heard it sometimes, too, now that Mrs. Kildare had
come to sit among them.--He had been writing out his sermon with unusual
care because he had remembered that she would listen to it.

He ran to wheel his shabby wing-chair up to the fire, where a pot of
coffee simmered on the hob, with a covered plate beside it.

"My supper," he explained, with a gesture of apology. "I often cook in
here because it seems more cozy than the kitchen."

"Is Dilsey misbehaving again?"

He nodded ruefully. "I can't think where she gets the stuff, Miss Kate;
the store won't sell it to her."

"Out of your emergency cupboard, I fancy. You give her all your keys, of
course, for fear she will imagine you don't trust her? Oh, Phil, Phil,"
she laughed at his guilty face. "How you do need a wife to look after
you!"

She settled herself comfortably in the comfortable chair, looking about
the pleasant, twilit room with the sense of well-being that always came
to her there. It was more homelike to her than the home where she had
lived for twenty years, her big rough house that had taken on so
irrevocably the look of the Kildares. Here faded brocade furniture,
books, well-shaded lamps, a blue bowl filled with rosy apples, a jar of
cedar-boughs that took the place of flowers now that the garden had gone
t