Kate seemed highly amused by this information, and Miss La Creevy went on painting and talking, with immovable complacency.
'What a number of officers you seem to paint!' said Kate, availing herself of a pause in the discourse, and glancing round the room.
'I scarcely know; I had expected to have seen him before now,' replied Kate. 'Soon I hope, for this state of uncertainty is worse than anything.'
'He is very rich, I have heard,' rejoined Kate. 'I don't know that he is, but I believe so.'
It took several strokes to regain the place she had lost, and when she got there, the other side had nearly won, for Kate's ball was the last but one and lay near the stake.
Goodbye, Kate. Miss Jo owes me one, so you are finished," cried Fred excitedly, as they all drew near to see the finish.
"Yankees have a trick of being generous to their enemies," said Jo, with a look that made the lad redden, "especially when they beat them," she added, as, leaving Kate's ball untouched, she won the game by a clever stroke.
Miss Kate sketched and Frank talked to Beth, who was making little mats of braided rushes to serve as plates.
Three times during the early fall and winter of that year Curtis Hartman crept out of his house to the room in the bell tower to sit in the darkness looking at the figure of Kate Swift lying in her bed and later went to walk and pray in the streets.
In the room in the house next door Kate Swift had not yet appeared.
On the January night, after he had come near dying with cold and after his mind had two or three times actually slipped away into an odd land of fan- tasy so that he had by an exercise of will power to force himself back into consciousness, Kate Swift appeared.
God has appeared to me in the person of Kate Swift, the school teacher, kneeling naked on a bed.