“You don’t know what is in it?” asked Kitty in a shocked voice. “Why, it may be that--”
“Oh, yes, I know what is in it!” he replied. “Her brother’s confidences were enough. I didn’t want to read it. I can imagine it all.”
“No, I think not. It would only hurt, and the hurting could do no good. I can hear what it says, and I don’t want to see it.”
He held the letter up to his ear whimsically. Then he handed it back to her, and she replaced it in the desk.
“So, there it is, and there it is,” he sighed. “You have got my story, and it’s bad enough, but you can see it’s not what Burlingame suggested.”
“Burlingame--but Burlingame’s beneath notice,” rejoined Kitty. “Isn’t he, mother?”
Mrs. Tynan nodded. Then, as though with sudden impulse, Kitty came forward to Crozier and leaned over him. The look of a mother was in her eyes. Somehow she seemed to herself twenty years older than this man with the heart of a boy, who was afraid of his own wife.
“It’s time for your beef-tea, and when you’ve had it you must get your sleep,” she said, with a hovering solicitude.
“I’d like to give him a threshing first, if you don’t mind,” said the Young Doctor to her.
“Please let a little good advice satisfy you,” Crozier remarked ruefully. “It will seem like old times,” he added rather bitterly.
“You are too young to have had ‘old times,’” said Kitty with gentle scorn. “I’ll like you better when you are older,” she added.
“Naughty jade,” exclaimed the Young Doctor, “you ought to be more respectful to those older than yourself.”
The harvest was over. The grain was cut, the prairie no longer waved like a golden sea, but the smoke of the incense of sacrifice still rose in innumerable spirals in the circle of the eye. The ground appeared bare and ill-treated, like a sheep first shorn; but yet nothing could take away from it the look of plenty, even as the fat sides of the shorn sheep invite the satisfied eye of the expert. The land now, all stubble, still looked good for anything. If bare, it did not seem starved. It was naked and unshaven; it was stripped like a boxer for the rubbing-down after the fight. Not so refined and suggestive and luxurious as when it was clothed with the coat of ripe corn in the ear, it still showed the fibre of its being to no disadvantage. And overhead the joy of the prairie grew apace.