direct than his mother's. He had, besides, been fond of Arthur, and his
efforts to keep the poor fellow straight had been less didactic and more
spontaneous. Their result read itself, if not in any change in Arthur's
character, at least in the revised wording of his will; and Denis's moral
sense was pleasantly fortified by the discovery that it very substantially
paid to be a good fellow.

The sense of general providentialness on which Mrs. Peyton reposed had in
fact been confirmed by events which reduced Denis's mourning to a mere
tribute of respect--since it would have been a mockery to deplore the
disappearance of any one who had left behind him such an unsavory wake as
poor Arthur. Kate did not quite know what had happened: her father was as
firmly convinced as Mrs. Peyton that young girls should not be admitted to
any open discussion of life. She could only gather, from the silences and
evasions amid which she moved, that a woman had turned up--a woman who was
of course "dreadful," and whose dreadfulness appeared to include a sort
of shadowy claim upon Arthur. But the claim, whatever it was, had been
promptly discredited. The whole question had vanished and the woman with
it. The blinds were drawn again on the ugly side of things, and life was
resumed on the usual assumption that no such side existed. Kate knew only
that a darkness had crossed her sky and left it as unclouded as before.

Was it, perhaps, she now asked herself, the very lifting of the
cloud--remote, unthreatening as it had been--which gave such new serenity
to her heaven? It was horrible to think that one's deepest security was
a mere sense of escape--that happiness was no more than a reprieve. The
perversity of such ideas was emphasized by Peyton's approach. He had the
gift of restoring things to their normal relations, of carrying one over
the chasms of life through the closed tunnel of an incurious cheerfulness.
All that was restless and questioning in the girl subsided in his presence,