"Perhaps he is cured of her," remarked the Young Doctor very gravely.

"No, no, the disease might have got headway, but it didn't," Kitty
returned, her face turned away. "He became a little better; but he was
never cured. That's the way with a man. He can never forget a woman he
has once cared for, and he can go back to her half loving her; but it
isn't the case with a woman. There's nothing so dead to a woman as a man
when she's cured of him. The woman is never dead to the man, no matter
what happens."

The Young Doctor regarded her with a strange, new interest and a puzzled
surprise. "Sappho--Sappho, how did you come to know these things!" he
exclaimed. "You are only a girl at best, or something of a boy-girl at
worst, and yet you have, or think you have, got into those places which
are reserved for the old-timers in life's scramble. You talk like an
ancient dame."

Kitty smiled, but her eyes had a slumbering look as if she was half
dreaming. "That's the mistake most of you make--men and women. There's
such a thing as instinct, and there's such a thing as keeping your eyes
open."

"What did Mrs. Crozier say when you told her about opening that five-
year-old letter? Did she hate you?"

Kitty nodded with wistful whimsicality. "For a minute she was like an
industrious hornet. Then I made her see she wouldn't have been here at
all if I hadn't opened it. That made, her come down from the top of her
nest on the church-spire, and she said that, considering my
opportunities, I was not such an aboriginal after all."