deed you've a wrong
conception of the matter. There is to be no stage play or newspaper work
in the case. It will be quietly adjusted. The Ravenels are not people to
permit any publicity. There will be compromises. Mrs. Ravenel, I hope,
need never know the facts in the case. There is none need ever know,
save Frank."

"You have never liked him, have you, Dermott?" Katrine asked, with
directness.

"Never," Dermott answered, with a frankness matching her own.

"Why?"

"Faith, and there are three excellent reasons," Dermott returned, with
something of his old manner: "He was himself; I was myself; and a
third," he paused, with all the power of his personality in his great
gray eyes, "a third," he repeated, "which I hope some time to explain to
you at great length, little Katrine."

XX

THE INFLUENCE OF WORK

Of Francis Ravenel at this time much could be written. In the first
months of his separation from Katrine, during all of the period of his
mother's illness, he remained firm in the intention expressed in the
unsent letter to visit her in Paris, ask her forgiveness, and make her a
formal offer of marriage. But quick on the heels of his return to New
York had followed the railroad business, to which Dermott McDermott's
insolence had added new reason for making the enterprise a successful
one.

But underneath the several postponements of visiting Katrine, the real
cause of them all, in fact, was a fear of the well-merited rebuff which
he might receive from her. He understood her pride well; and although he
believed that she had not ceased to love him, he doubted if he held her
respect, and many times, when instinct bade him go to her, he had
recalled the pleading tones of her voice in that last interview, when
she had cried: "We may never meet again! Ah, please God, we may never
meet again!"

Katrine's letters, which came to him with perfect regularity, kept him
closely in touch with her daily life in Paris. He looked anxiously in
them for any variation in her sentiments toward himself, but found none.

Reading one night in Firdousi, he discovered a passage which described
Katrine so perfectly to him that he put a marker between the pages of
the book, and kept it by his bedside to read at night as a pious person
might have kept the confession of his faith.

"She was an elemental force," wrote the old poet, "and astonished
me by her amount of life, when I saw her day after day radiating