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."