hands than ours." John Archdale's piety was of the kind that utters
itself in solitude, or under the breath.

Katie at the moment was upstairs with her mother examining a package of
wedding gear that had arrived that day. She had no hesitation as to whom
her choice should have been. Yet, as she stood holding a pair of gloves,
measuring the long wrists on her arm and then drawing out the fingers
musingly, it was not of Stephen that she was thinking, or of him that
she spoke at last, as she turned away to lay down the gloves and take up
a piece of lace.

"Mother," she said, "I do sometimes feel badly for Master Harwin; he is
the only man in all the world that I ever had anything like fear of, and
now and then I did of him, such a fierceness would come over him once in
a while, not to me, but about me, I know, about losing me. He was
terribly in earnest. Stephen never gets into these moods, he is always
kind and lovable, just as he has been to me as far back as I can
remember, only, of course more so now."

"But things have gone differently with him and with poor Master Harwin,"
answered Mrs. Archdale. "If you had said 'no' to Stephen, you would have
seen the dark moods in him, too."

The young girl looked at her mother and smiled, and blushed a little in
a charming acknowledgment of feminine power to sway the minds of the
sterner half of humanity. Then she grew thoughtful again, not even
flattery diverting her long from her subject.

"But Stephen never could be like that," she said. "Stephen couldn't be
dark in that desperate sort of way. I can't describe it in Master