the sun go down behind the mountains. "There's a letter of Mr. Ravenel's I'd like you to see, Katrine," he said, motioning her to bring him the carefully treasured bundle of Frank's writings.
After assisting him to find the desired letter, she sat at his feet with a white face and fixed eyes as he read:
"I met Katrine to-day on the river-bank. She was well and beautiful and happy. It makes me want to be a better man every time I see her. I want to help to make her life happy—" The hand which held the letter suddenly dropped lifeless.
"Father!" she cried. And again: "Oh, father, can you leave me like this?" And as the truth came to her that she was alone, Nature was merciful, and she fell unconscious by her father's body, with Frank's letters lying scattered around her on the floor.
After her father's burial there followed the collapse which comes so frequently to those women who have the power to bear great trials in silence.
In the small, white bed, with vines reddening around the window and shining into the room, Katrine lay, day after day, with the pallor of death on her face and a horrible nausea of life,
but with a merciful benumbing of the power to suffer further. For more than a fortnight she lay, worn out with the task of living, with a Heaven-sent indifference to trouble past or to come.
But with the return of strength the problem of daily living was to be solved. The little stock of money which she and Nora had between them was used for the last sad needs of her father, and with Dermott McDermott away she knew no one to whom she could turn.
"Don't you be minding troubles like these, though, Miss Katrine," Nora sympathized. "Niver ye mind a bit! Ye're wanting to go away, and we'll find the money to go. We've some bits of trinkets, an old watch or two, and I'm a good hand at a bargain. And we'll not want to carry the furniture on our backs like turtles, either. I know a woman in Marlton whose heart's been set on the old sideboard for months back. We'll go slow, Miss Katrine, but with your voice we've no great cause for worry, my lamb. Look at the thing with sense, and trust to Nora; she'll manage it all. And in a few weeks we'll be off to New York, that wicked old place that I'm far from denyin' I like fine."
On the day before this departure there fell an event, small in itself, yet so momentous in its out