answered it
without its being finished.

"He has not been drinking. Oh, Miss Katrine, he's past that! Can't ye
understand? The hand of God's upon him! He's called away, Miss Katrine.
Ye should have seen him as he crawled to the doorway and fell on it. I
got him to his own seat by the window, and he's wanting you, Miss
Katrine, he's wanting you sore! So I come, in part to tell you, but more
to have ye prepare yerself for the change in him, for his end's in
sight!"

Although she was trembling from head to foot and had grown ashen pale,
Katrine spoke calmly.

"He came alone?"

Nora shook her head in the affirmative.

"It seems, Miss Katrine, that there was some organic trouble; that the
great specialist, whose name is gone from me, warned him not to try the
cure. He said the other disease was too far along. But your father
wanted to be himself again. It was for you he wanted it. It was the
disgrace he was to you that was on his mind always."

"Ah!" she cried, "there was still enough of the old pride in him for
that! We must pretend not to understand that he is ill, we must try just
to seem glad that he is back home with us again."

When Katrine entered the room where her father sat, she found him, as
Nora had said, by the window, his head thrown back, his eyes closed; nor
did he open them at her coming, though by a poor movement of the hands
he made her understand his knowledge of her presence.

"Little Katrine," he said, while two great tears welled from under the
closed lids. "Little Bother-the-House! I have come back to you. There is
no one can help me except you."

Katrine made a swift movement to be near him. Kneeling, she drew his
poor, sorrowing head to her breast, and in the twilight these two, the
one so old and weak and loving, the other so young and desolate and
brave, clung to each other, blinded by the vision of the separation so
soon to be.

In nearly every crisis of life there comes some twist in affairs which
seems to turn the screws harder or sets them to making one flinch in a
new and unexpected place. In Katrine's case it was a turn which made
life so unbearable that there were times when she would be forced to
bite her lips and set her teeth to keep back a moan, while for hours at
a time Patrick Dulany iterated and reiterated the kindness, the
thoughtfulness, the goodness to him of Francis Ravenel.

"There was never a day, Katrine, while I was at the hospital, that I had
not a letter fro