At sunset the bitter wind which had been blowing all day long turned into a gale, a rascal wind, which slapped a handful of sleet and ice, hard as glass, on one side of your face, and scurried round the corner to come back and strike harder from an entirely different direction. The storm must have suited his mood in some way, for Dermott McDermott chose to walk through it, arriving at Katrine's door breathless and flushed, the fur of his coat gleaming with ice and snow. Here he found a glowing fire, with the old mahogany settle on one side and the green grandmother's chair on the other; the dull glow of old tapestry; flowers; the odor of mignonette; and Katrine herself, in a scarlet gown, delighted as a child at his coming. Perhaps it was the clatter and roaring and discomfort without which accentuated the peace and happiness within, and led him, more than he knew, to that precipitancy of conduct which ended disastrously for him. As he sat in the great green chair Katrine looked up at him from the settle, and something in the intensity of his gaze made her make a quick gesture of warning to him before he spoke. "Will you marry me, Katrine?" She looked again quickly, to see if he could be jesting. In North Carolina it was his custom to ask her every day; but his sudden pallor and the choked voice told how terribly he was in earnest. She answered, with a note of despair in her voice, "I wish with all my heart I could, Dermott." "And why not?" he asked. "It wouldn't be fair to you. There is some one else," she explained, bravely, a great wave of coloring coming to her face at the confession. "Whom ye will marry?" he asked. She shook her head. "I think not. It seems as if I could almost say I hope not." "Dear," Dermott said, "I've loved you--always--ever since I've known you. When you were just a wee bit girl in New York, six years ago, and ye stood off the mob of boys who were baiting the old Jew--since then I've taken every thought for you I could. And I'm asking you to believe me when I tell you that I want your happiness more than my own. I've felt always that you'll never succeed as a public singer, and here of late, since I've known the St. Petersburg contracts were signed, I've suffered in my thoughts of you. We'll just leave another suitor out of the question. It's these public appearances of yours I dread at the present. If stage life could be as it seems from the right side of the footlights; if you knew nothing of the people or their lives, except as Valentine or Siegfried, it would be different. But the meanness of it; the little jealousies; the ignorant egotisms; I am afraid you can never do it, you will despise it so." He waited a little as though recalling stage life, in which he had taken some active part, before he continued with a noble selfishness.