Family Pride

And where all the while was Morris? Were his patients so numerous that he could not find time to call upon his cousin? Katy had inquired for him immediately after her arrival, but in her excitement she had forgotten him again, until Wilford was gone and tea was over, when, just as she had done on the day of her return from Canandaigua, she took her hat and started on the well-worn path toward Linwood. She was not going there, she said, she only wanted to try the road and see if it had changed since she used to go that way to gather butternuts in the autumn or berries in the summer. Airily she tripped along, her light plaid silk gleaming through the deep green of the trees and revealing her coming to the tired man sitting upon a little rustic seat, beneath a chestnut tree, where he once had sat with Katy, and extracted a cruel sliver from her hand, kissing the place to make it well as she told him to. She was a child then, a little girl of twelve, and he was twenty, but the sight of her pure face lifted confidingly to his had stirred his heart as no other face had stirred it since, making him look forward to a time when the hand he kissed would be his own, and his the fairy form he watched so carefully as it expanded day by day into the perfect woman. He was thinking of that time now, and how different it had all turned out, when he heard the bounding step and saw her coming toward him, swinging her hat in childish abandon, and warbling a song she had learned from him.

"Morris, oh, Morris!" she cried, as she ran eagerly forward; "I am so glad to see you. It seems so nice to be with you once more here in the dear old woods. Don't get up--please don't get up," she continued, as he started to rise.

She was standing before him, a hand on either side of his face, into which she was looking quite as wistfully as he was regarding her. Something she missed in his manner, something which troubled her; and thinking she knew what it was, she said to him: "Why don't you kiss me, Morris? You used to. Ain't you glad to see me?"

"Yes, very glad," he answered, and drawing her down to the bench beside him, he kissed her twice, but so gravely, so quietly, that Katy was not satisfied at all, and tears gathered in her eyes as she tried to think what it was ailed Morris.