"And your mother's name before marriage was——"
"I'm ashamed that I never knew. It must have been spoken often, but I was so young; it never stayed in my mind. And a little while before he died my father burned all his letters and papers. I've wondered about their life long ago before I came, but I think my father meant me not to know. He had some reason."
"I am glad you have told me all you did know," she said.
"But you have made me glad," he assured her, returning to his livelier manner.
"Your mother's first name"—she asked—"what did your father call her?"
"Oh, that—Katharine. He called her Kitty."
"Kitty!" She repeated it after him, softly, as if she spoke it in compassion to the portrait.
"But see," he continued, "it's late. Stay and eat with us and I'll take you back by moonlight. I've ordered a fine, big, silver moon to be set up in the sky at seven, and Ben is already getting supper."
He pulled aside the blanket portiére, and through the doorway she could see the saturnine one—a man fashioned for tragedies, for deeds of desperate hazard—incongruously busied with a pan of soda biscuits and a hissing broiler.
When they rode back to Bar-7 the hills were struck to silver by the moon. They were companionably silent for most of the ride, though the youth from time to time, when the trail narrowed to put him in the rear, crooned stray bits of a song with which Ben Crider had favored them while he prepared the evening meal. The lines Mrs Laithe remembered were: