would only feed the flame, and so she offered none directly, but heard
him patiently to the end, and then quietly questioned him of Katy and
her family, especially the last. What did he know of it? Was it one to
detract from the Cameron line kept untarnished so long? Were the
relatives such as he never need blush to own, even if they came there
into their drawing-room, as they would come if Katy did?

Wilford thought of Uncle Ephraim as he had seen him upon the platform at
Silverton, and could scarcely repress a smile as he pictured to himself
his mother's consternation at beholding that man in her drawing-room,
but he did not mention the deacon, though he acknowledged that Katy's
family friends were not exactly the Cameron style. But Katy was young;
Katy could be easily molded, and once away from her old associates, his
mother and sisters could make of her what they pleased.

"I understand, then, that if you marry her you do not marry the family,"
and in the handsome, matronly face there was an expression from which
Katy would have shrunk; could she have seen it and understood its
meaning.

"No, I do not marry the family," Wilford rejoined, emphatically, but the
expression of his face was different from his mother's, for where she
thought only of herself, not hesitating to trample on all Katy's love of
home and friends, Wilford remembered Katy, thinking how he would make
amends for separating her wholly from her home, as he surely meant to do
if he should win her. "Did I tell you," he continued, "that her father
was a judge? She must be well connected on that side, though I never
heard of a Judge Lennox in any of our courts."

"It must have been when you were in Europe the first time," Mrs. Cameron