In his great pity for Katy when she was first a widow, Morris had scarcely remembered that she was free, or if it did flash upon his mind, he thrust the thought aside as injustice to the dead; but as the months and the year went by, and he heard constantly from Helen of Katy's increasing cheerfulness, it was not in his nature never to think of what might be, and more than once he had prayed that, if consistent with his Father's will, that the woman he had loved so well should be his yet. If not, he could go his way alone, just as he had always done, knowing that it was right.
Such was the state of Morris' mind when he returned from Washington, but now it was somewhat different. The weary weeks of sickness, during which Katy had ministered to him so kindly, had not been without their effect, and if Morris had loved the frolicsome, childlike Katy Lennox much, he loved far more the gentle, beautiful woman whose character had been so wonderfully developed by suffering, and who was now far more worthy of his love than in her early girlhood.
"I cannot lose her now," was the thought constantly in Morris' mind, as he experienced more and more how desolate were the days which did not bring her to him. "It is twenty months, just, since Wilford died; and George Washington asked Martha Custis for her hand within less time than that after her husband's death," he said to himself one wet October afternoon, when he sat listening dreamily to the patter of the rain falling upon the windows, and looking occasionally across the fields to the farmhouse, in the vain hope of spying in the distance the little airy form, which, in its waterproof and cloud, had braved worse storms than this at the time he was so ill.
But no such figure appeared. He hardly expected it would, but he watched the pathway just the same, and the smoke wreaths rising so high above the farmhouse. The deacon burned out his chimney that day, and Morris, whose sight had greatly improved of late, knew it by the dense, black volume of smoke, mingled with rings of fire, which rose above the roof, remembering so well another rainy day, twenty years ago, when the deacon's chimney was cleaned, and a little, toddling girl, in scarlet gown and white pinafore, had amused herself with throwing into the blazing fire upon the hearth a straw at a time, almost upsetting herself with standing so far back and making such efforts to reach the flames. A great deal had passed since then. The little girl in the pinafore had been both wife and mother. She was a widow now, and Morris glanced across his hearth toward the empty chair he had never seen in imagination filled by any but herself.