Whether it was not hopelessly out of taste to have a father-in-law who had been shot by the Missourians? Whether he could persuade Kitty to suppress that part of her history? That she looked very pretty, sitting there, with her earnest eyes lifted toward his. These things flashed wilfully through Mr. Arbuton's mind. "My father was a Free-State man," continued Kitty, in a tone of pride. "He wasn't when he first went to Kansas," she added simply; while Mr. Arbuton groped among his recollections of that forgotten struggle for some association with these names, keenly feeling the squalor of it all, and thinking still how very pretty she was. "He went out there to publish a proslavery paper. But when he found out what the Border Ruffians really were, he turned against them. He used to be very bitter about my uncle's having become an Abolitionist; they had had a quarrel about it; but father wrote to him from Kansas, and they made it up; and before father died he was able to tell mother that we were to go to uncle's. But mother was sick then, and she only lived a month after father; and when my cousin came out to get us, just before she died, there was scarcely a crust of cornbread in our cabin. It seemed like heaven to get to Eriecreek; but even at Eriecreek we live in a way that I am afraid you wouldn't respect. My uncle has just enough, and we are very plain people indeed. I suppose," continued the young girl meekly, "that I haven't had at all what you'd call an education. Uncle told me what to read, at first, and after that I helped myself. It seemed to come naturally; but don't you see that it wasn't an education?" "I beg pardon," said Mr. Arbuton, with a blush; for he had just then lost the sense of what she said in the music of her voice, as it hesitated over these particulars of her history. "I mean," explained Kitty, "that I'm afraid I must be very one-sided. I'm dreadfully ignorant of a great many things. I haven't any accomplishments, only the little bit of singing and playing that you've heard; I couldn't tell a good picture from a bad one; I've never been to the opera; I don't know anything about society. Now just imagine," cried Kitty, with sublime impartiality, "such a girl as that in Boston!" Even Mr. Arbuton could not help smiling at this comic earnestness, while she resumed: "At home my cousins and I do all kinds of things that the ladies whom you know have done for them. We do our own work, for one thing," she continued, with a sudden treacherous misgiving that what she was saying might be silly and not heroic, but bravely stifling her doubt. "My cousin Virginia is housekeeper, and Rachel does the sewing, and I'm a kind of maid-of-all-work."