proposed
a visit to the old man who kept the lodge.

Kitty shook her head. There was an objection to the old man. "He asks
questions; he wants to know how I get on with my sums. He's proud of
his summing; and he finds me out when I'm wrong. I don't like the
lodge-keeper."

Catherine looked the other way, toward the house. The pleasant fall of
water in the basin of the distant fountain was just audible. "Go and
feed the gold-fishes," she suggested.

This was a prospect of amusement which at once raised Kitty's spirits.
"That's the thing!" she cried, and ran off to the fountain, with the
nursemaid after her.

Catherine seated herself under the trees, and watched in solitude the
decline of the sun in a cloudless sky. The memory of the happy years
of her marriage had never been so sadly and persistently present to her
mind as at this time, when the choice of another married life waited her
decision to become an accomplished fact. Remembrances of the past, which
she had such bitter reason to regret, and forebodings of the future, in
which she was more than half inclined to believe, oppressed her at one
and the same moment. She thought of the different circumstances, so
widely separated by time, under which Herbert (years ago) and Bennydeck
(twenty-four hours since) had each owned his love, and pleaded for an
indulgent hearing. Her mind contrasted the dissimilar results.

Pressed by the faithless man who had so cruelly wronged her in
after-years, she only wondered why he had waited so long before he
asked her to marry him. Addressed with equal ardor by that other man,
whose age, whose character, whose modest devotion offered her every
assurance of happiness that a woman could desire, she had struggled
against herself, and had begged him to give her a day to consider.
That day was now drawing to an end. As she watched the setting sun, the
phantom of her guilty husband darkened the heavenly light; imbittered
the distrust of herself which made her afraid to say Yes; and left her
helpless before the hesitation which prevented her from saying No.

The figure of a man appeared on the lonely path that led to the lodge
gate.

Impulsively she rose from her seat as he advanced. She sat down again.
After that first act of indecision, the flutter of her spirits abated;
she was able to think.

To avoid him, after he had spared her at her own request, would have
been an act of ingratitude: to receive him was to place herself onc