"Sick or well, with money or without, he is the kindest father in the world. Save in one way, it is always for me he thinks." Her hand lay on the log. It was small and white, and she was very beautiful. Frank had seldom resisted temptation. This one he did not even try to resist, and he placed his hand over hers. "Katrine," he said, "I am not a particularly good man, but the gods have willed that we meet—meet in strange moods and a strange way. I am a better man to-night than I have ever been in my life. It's the music, maybe, or the fringed gentian, or the whippoorwills." There was love-making in every tone of his voice. "Whatever it is, it makes me want to help you. May I? Will you trust me?" She turned her hand upward, as a child might have done, to clasp his, looking him full in the eyes as she did so. "Utterly," she said. "I have not always been considered trustworthy," he explained, lightly. "People may not have understood you." There was a sweet explaining in her voice. "Which may have been, on the whole, fortunate for me," he answered, with a curious smile. "Don't," she said—"don't talk of yourself like that. I know you are good, good, good!" "Thank you," and again there came to him the throb in the throat he had felt when their eyes first met. "Believe me," he said, "I shall always try to be—to you," and as he spoke he raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. A noise startled him. Some one was approaching with uncertain footsteps and a shuffling gait, and at the sound the girl's face turned crimson. "Katrine, little Katrine, where are you?" a voice cried, thickly and uncertainly, as a man came from under the gloom of the trees. There was not a moment's hesitation. The child rose and put her arms around the figure with a divine, womanly gesture, as though to shield him and his infirmities from the whole world. It was the action of one ashamed to be ashamed. "Daddy," she said, laying her head against his shoulder, "this is Mr. Ravenel!" III A KINDNESS WITH MIXED MOTIVES
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