“She’s so excited over Kate’s coming home,” said Mrs. Barrington with a placatory smile.  “Perhaps you’ll light up to-night, Frederick.”

“No, I won’t.  I began work at five this morning and I’ve been going all day.  It’s up to you and Martha to run the house.”

“The truth is,” said Mrs. Barrington, “neither Martha nor I can reach the gasolier.”

Dr. Barrington had the effect of pouncing on this statement.

“That’s what’s the matter, then,” he said.  “You forgot to get the tapers.  I heard Martha telling you last night that they were out.”

A flush spread over Mrs. Barrington’s delicate face as she cast about her for the usual subterfuge and failed to find it.  In that moment Kate realized that it had been a long programme of subterfuges with her mother—­subterfuges designed to protect her from the onslaughts of the irritable man who dominated her.

“I’ll light the gas, mummy,” she said gently.  “Let that be one of my fixed duties from now on.”

“You’ll spoil your mother, Kate,” said the doctor with a whimsical intonation.

His jesting about what had so marred the hour of reunion brought a surge of anger to Kate’s brain.

“That’s precisely what I came home to do, sir,” she said significantly.  “What other reason could I have for coming back to Silvertree?  The town certainly isn’t enticing.  You’ve been doctoring here for forty years, but you havn’t been able to cure the local sleeping-sickness yet.”

It stung and she had meant it to.  To insult Silvertree was to hurt the doctor in his most tender vanity.  It was one of his most fervid beliefs that he had selected a growing town, conspicuous for its enterprise.  In his young manhood he had meant to do fine things.  He was public-spirited, charitable, a death-fighter of courage and persistence.  Though not a religious man, he had one holy passion, that of the physician.  He respected himself and loved his wife, but he had from boyhood confused the ideas of masculinity and tyranny.  He believed that women needed discipline, and he had little by little destroyed the integrity of the woman he would have most wished to venerate.  That she could, in spite of her manifest cowardice and moral circumventions, still pray nightly and read the book that had been the light to countless faltering feet, furnished him with food for acrid sarcasm.  He saw in this only the essential furtiveness, inconsistency, and superstition of the female.

The evening dragged.  The neighbors who would have liked to visit them refrained from doing so because they thought the reunited family would prefer to be alone that first evening.  Kate did her best to preserve some tattered fragments of the amenities.  She told college stories, talked of Lena Vroom and of beautiful Honora Fulham,—­hinted even at Ray McCrea,—­and by dint of much ingenuity wore the evening away.

“In the morning,” she said to her father as she bade him good-night, “we’ll both be rested.”  She had meant it for an apology, not for herself any more than for him, but he assumed no share in it.