For three weeks Katy had been at the Mountain House, growing stronger every day, until she was much like the Katy of one year ago. But their stay among the Catskills was ended, and on the morrow they were going to Saratoga, where Mrs. Cameron and her daughters were, and where, too, was Sybil Grandon, the reigning belle of the United States. So Bell had written to her brother, bidding him hasten on with Katy, as she wished to see “that chit of a widow in her proper place.” And Katy had been weak enough for a moment to feel a throb of satisfaction in knowing how effectually Sybil’s claims to belle-ship would be put aside when she was once in the field; even glancing at herself in the mirror as she leaned on Wilford’s shoulder, and feeling glad that mountain air and mountain exercise had brought the roses back to her white cheeks and the brightness to her eyes. But Katy wept passionate tears of repentance for that weakness, when an hour later she read the letter which Dr. Grant had sent in answer to one she had written from the Mountain House, confessing her short-comings, and lamenting that the evils and excesses which shocked her once did not startle her now. To this letter Morris had replied as a brother might write to an only sister, first expressing pleasure at her happiness, and then reminding her of that other life to which this is only a preparation, and beseeching her so to use the good things of this world, given her in such profusion, as not to lose the life eternal. This was the substance of Morris’s letter, which Katy read with streaming eyes, forgetting Saratoga as Morris’s solemn words of warning and admonition rang in her ears, and shuddering as she thought of losing the life eternal, of going where Morris would never come, nor any of those she loved the best, unless it were Wilford, who might reproach her with having dragged him there when she could have saved him. “Keep yourself unspotted from the world,” Morris had said, and she repeated it to herself, asking “how shall I do that? how can one be good and fashionable too?”