is long-planned endearing
speeches, and used them. But he could not bring a blush to her cheek.
She did presently look straight at him, her eye passing quickly and
critically over the neat paunchy little figure in its fashionably-cut
coat and tight-fitting trowsers. When she was a girl of ten she had
fancied that Dr. Brownlee would be her future husband--the actual
Sir Guy. She would listen Sunday after Sunday to the gray-bearded old
fellow dealing the thunders of Sinai from the pulpit overhead, in a
rapt delight, thinking how sweet it would be to be guided step by step
by so holy and great a man. Long after she grew out of that, indeed
only a year or two ago, she used to tremble and grow hot to her
finger-tips when young Herr Bluhm, the music-master, went by the gate.
A nod of his curly bullet head or the tramp of his sturdy cowskin
boots along the road made her nerves tingle as never before. "What was
this that ailed her?" she had asked herself a dozen times a day. All
Mr. Muller's love-making did not move her now as one note of Bluhm's
voluntaries on the organ had done. She had thought him Mendelssohn and
Mozart in one: the tears came now, thinking of that divine music. But
one day Mrs. Guinness had brought him in, being a phrenologist, to
"feel Kitty's head." She felt the astonished indignation yet which
stunned her from his thick thumb and fore finger as they gripped and
fumbled over her head as if she had been a log of wood. But what could
poor Bluhm know of the delicate fancies about himself in her brain as
he measured it, which his heavy paws, smelling of garlic and tobacco,
were putting to flight? "Philoprogenitiveness--whew! this little girl
will be fond of children, madam. Tune, time!--has no more notion of
music than a frog."

"At least," thought Catharine now, "Mr. Muller is a gentleman. I shall
never feel disgust for him."

They had reached the gate now. He waited. "I shall not come in. I've
confused and startled you, Catharine. You want time to think," he said
gently.

"I understand, oh, I quite understand. But I never thought of myself
as your wife," she said quietly. "It would be better you gave me
time."

"Good-bye, then, my--my darling."

"Good-bye."

She stood looking over the gate, the walnut branches dark overhead, a
level ray of sunlight on her strange alluring eyes and full bosom. Mr.
Muller lingered, smoothing his hat before he put it on.

"She has not at all the intellectual power of