rew
greenish. She breathed with difficulty.

"Oh, Agatha!" was all she could say.

"I do not regret it," said Agatha. "If he is going to ruin himself, he
is not going to do it without knowing that the Bates family highly
disapprove of his course."

"But why drag me in?" said Kate, almost too shocked to speak at all.
"Maybe he LOVES Mrs. Southey. She has let him see how she feels about
him; possibly he feels the same about her."

"He does, if he weds her," said Agatha, conclusively. "Anything any
one could say or do would have no effect, if he had centred his
affections upon her, of that you may be very sure."

"May I?" asked Kate, dully.

"Indeed, you may!" said Agatha. "The male of the species, when he is a
man of Robert's attainments and calibre, can be swerved from pursuit of
the female he covets, by nothing save extinction."

"You mean," said Kate with an effort, "that if Robert asked a woman to
marry him, it would mean that he loved her."

"Indubitably!" cried Agatha.

Kate laughed until she felt a little better, but she went home in a
mood far different from that in which she started. Then she had been
very happy, and she had intended to tell Agatha about her happiness,
the very first of all. Now she was far from happy. Possibly--a
thousand things, the most possible, that Robert had responded to
Agatha's suggestion, and stopped and asked her that abrupt question,
from an impulse as sudden and inexplicable as had possessed her when
she married George Holt. Kate fervently wished she had gone to the
cornfield as usual that afternoon.

"That's the way it goes," she said angrily, as she threw off her better
dress and put on her every-day gingham to prepare supper. "That's the
way it goes! Stay in your element, and go on with your work, and
you're all right. Leave your job and go trapesing over the country,
wasting your time, and you get a heartache to pay you. I might as well
give up the idea that I'm ever to be happy, like anybody else. Every
time I think happiness is coming my way, along comes something that
knocks it higher than Gilderoy's kite. Hang the luck!"

She saw Robert pass while she was washing the dishes, and knew he was
going to Agatha's, and would stop when he came back. She finished her
work, put Little Poll to bed, and made herself as attractive as she
knew how in her prettiest blue dress. All the time she debated whether
she would say anything to him about what Agatha had