alive; using only half
your faculties; you must feel that for yourself. That is why--" Here he
stopped himself, and they began to walk slowly along the Embankment, the
moon fronting them.

"With how sad steps she climbs the sky,
How silently and with how wan a face,"

Rodney quoted.

"I've been told a great many unpleasant things about myself to-night,"
Katharine stated, without attending to him. "Mr. Denham seems to think
it his mission to lecture me, though I hardly know him. By the way,
William, you know him; tell me, what is he like?"

William drew a deep sigh.

"We may lecture you till we're blue in the face--"

"Yes--but what's he like?"

"And we write sonnets to your eyebrows, you cruel practical creature.
Denham?" he added, as Katharine remained silent. "A good fellow, I
should think. He cares, naturally, for the right sort of things, I
expect. But you mustn't marry him, though. He scolded you, did he--what
did he say?"

"What happens with Mr. Denham is this: He comes to tea. I do all I can
to put him at his ease. He merely sits and scowls at me. Then I show him
our manuscripts. At this he becomes really angry, and tells me I've no
business to call myself a middle-class woman. So we part in a huff; and
next time we meet, which was to-night, he walks straight up to me, and
says, 'Go to the Devil!' That's the sort of behavior my mother complains
of. I want to know, what does it mean?"

She paused and, slackening her steps, looked at the lighted train
drawing itself smoothly over Hungerford Bridge.

"It means, I should say, that he finds you chilly and unsympathetic."

Katharine laughed with round, separate notes of genuine amusement.

"It's time I jumped into a cab and hid myself in my own house," she
exclaimed.

"Would your mother object to my being seen with you? No one could
possibly recognize us, could they?" Rodney inquired, with some
solicitude.

Katharine looked at him, and perceiving that his solicitude was genuine,
she laughed again, but with an ironical note in her laughter.

"You may laugh, Katharine, but I can tell you that if any of your
friends saw us together at this time of night they would talk about it,
and I should find that very disagreeable. But why do you laugh?"

"I don't know. Because you're such a queer mixture, I think. You're half
poet and half old maid."

"I know I always seem to you highly ridiculous. But I can't help having
inherited certain traditions a