She could not see her companion's face, and was so full of her own reflections that she failed to notice her silence. Polly did not even sniff.
"Then there's Ted," Katharine continued presently. "Even Ted was strange to-night; and Ted has never been like that to me before. I can't think what has come over everybody. What have I done to deserve it all?"
"Mercy me!" cried Polly suddenly. "Is there another of them? Who on earth is Ted?"
"Ted? Why, you must have seen him in the hall sometimes; he often comes to take me out. I have known him all my life; he is only a little older than I am, and I am devoted to him. I would not quarrel with Ted for anything in the whole world; it would be like quarrelling with myself. And to-night I ran into him, just as I came out of—of the other one's chambers; and I was so glad to see him, because Ted is always so sweet to me when I am in trouble; and—and Ted was quite funny, and he wouldn't speak to me at all, and he just put me into a hansom and left me to come home alone. I can't think why he behaved so oddly. I know he used not to get on with—with the other one, and that is why I never told him I had met him again up here in London; and I suppose he caught sight of him to-night in the doorway,—there was a lamp just above,—but still, he need not have been hurtuntil he had heard my explanation, need he? Why has every one turned against me at once?"
Polly remained silent no longer. She turned and stared at the prostrate figure on the bed, with all the power of her small, watery blue eyes.
"I really think you beat everything I ever knew," she exclaimed.
"What?" said Katharine, who had turned her face to the wall, and was occupied in meditating miserably on the problem of her existence. "What do you mean?"
Polly lost all control over herself.
"Do you mean to tell me that you never saw any harm in all this?" she cried emphatically. "Do you really mean to say that you have been carrying on anyhow with two men at once, going to their chambers late at night, and letting yourself be seen in public with them, without knowing that it was unusual? Didn't you ever see the danger in it? You are either the biggest fool in creation or the biggest humbug! One man at a time would be bad enough; but two! My eye!"
"But—there wasn't any harm," pleaded Katharine. "Why does no one understand? It seemed quite natural to me. They were sodifferent, and I liked them in such opposite ways, don't you see? I have known Ted all my life; he is a dear boy, and that is all. But Paul is clever and strong; he is a man, and he knows about things. And I never knew it was wrong; I didn'tfeelwicked, somehow. I wonder if that was what Paul was thinking, when he said I was a prig? Oh, dear! oh, dear! I have never been so wretched in my whole life!"
"Did he say that about you? Well, I don't wonder."
Katharine looked hopelessly at her unsympathetic profile, with the snub nose and the small chin, and the hair twisted up into tight plaits and the ends tied with white tape; and her eyes wandered down the red flannel dressing-gown to the large slippered feet that emerged from beneath it.
"You called me a prig, too," she said, humbly. "I overheard you."
"I thought so then," said Polly gruffly.
"Do you think so now? Is it true? Am I a prig?" She awaited the answer anxiously. Polly gave her another pitiless stare.
"I'm bothered if I know," she said. "But if you're not, you ought to be in the nursery. Only don't go telling people the things you'vebeen telling me to-night, or you might get yourself into worse trouble. You'd better go to sleep now, and leave it till to-morrow. My conscience! you'd make some people sit up, you would!"
Katharine felt she had endured as much contempt as she could bear that evening; but she made a last attempt to recover some of her self-respect.
"I wish you would tell me why it is wrong to do things that are not really wrong in themselves, just because people say they are wrong?" she asked, rather sleepily.
"Because people can make it so jolly unpleasant for you if you don't agree with them," said Polly bluntly. "And if you fancy you're going to alter all that, you must make up your mind to be called a prig. You can't have a good time and defy convention as you've been doing, and then expect to get off scot free without being called a prig; it isn't likely. Most people are content to take things as they are; it's a jolly sight more comfortable, and it's good enough for them. Good-night."
"I sha'n't sleep," Katharine called after her. And Polly sniffed.
And the next thing that Katharine remembered was being awakened by her in the earlymorning, and told in a gruff voice that she might sit with Phyllis if she liked, until some one came to relieve her.
"All right," she replied, drowsily. "How tired you look; didn't you sleep well?"
"Sleep? There wasn't much chance of that, when she was talking gibberish all the time. She's quieter now, and you can fetch Jenny if you want anything. I must be off; I shall be late as it is. Just like my luck to get my early week when she is ill!"
And there by the bedside of Phyllis Hyam, before any one else in the house was astir, Katharine sat and pondered again over the events of the day before. They seemed just as tragic as ever, separated as they were from her by a few hours of forgetfulness; and she wondered miserably how she was going to take up her life as usual, and go about her work as though nothing had happened. "That is why it is so hard to be a woman," she murmured, full of pity for her own troubles. And yet, when Miss Jennings came and took her post in the sick-room, and she was free to go to school, she found that it was a relief to be compelled to do something, and her work seemed easier to her than she had ever found it before. She had never given a better lecturethan she gave that morning; and something that was outside herself seemed to come to her assistance all day, and remained with her until her work was done. But when she returned home in the evening, the full significance of her unfortunate situation stared her again in the face; and the news that Phyllis was worse and was not allowed to see any one was so in keeping with her feelings, that she felt unable even to make a comment upon it.
"I always said that Miss Austen hadn't a spark of feeling in her," observed the girl who had given her the information; and Katharine overheard her, and began to wonder mechanically if it were true. Every faculty she possessed seemed deadened at that moment; she had no longer the inclination even to rebel against her fate. She sat on the stairs, outside the bedroom she was not allowed to enter, and took a strange delicious pleasure in dwelling upon the whole of her intercourse with Paul. There was not a conversation or a chance meeting with him, that she did not go through in her mind with a scrupulous accuracy; the pain of it became almost unendurable at moments, and yet it was an exquisite torture that brought her some measure of relief. She even forced herself to recall her last meeting withhim, and was surprised in an apathetic sort of way when she found that she did not want to cry any more.
And from thinking of Paul, she naturally fell to thinking of Ted too. And it slowly dawned upon her, as she considered it in the light of her present mood, that what Polly had said in her vulgar, uncompromising manner, was the truth. For a whole year she had been living in a false atmosphere of contentment; she had deluded herself into the belief that she was superior to convention and human nature combined, and she had ended in proving herself a complete failure. Paul had seen through her self-righteousness, he had nothing but contempt for her, and he had found it a relief to turn from her to the human and faulty Marion Keeley. In the depths of her self-abasement, she had even ceased to feel angry with Marion.
And Ted had found her out. That was the worst of all. On the impulse of the moment, she fetched some paper and wrote to him at once, sitting there on the uncarpeted stairs, while the people passed up and down unheeded by her. It was a very humble letter, full of pleading confession and self-accusation,—such a letter as she had never sent him before, and written from a standpoint she had neveryet been obliged to assume towards him. It was a relief at the moment to be doing something; but she regretted her action the whole of the following day, and hardly knew how to open his reply when she found it awaiting her, on her return home in the evening. It was very short.
"Dear Kitty," it ran:—
Don't mind about me. It's a rotten world, and I'm the rottenest fool in it. I was only hit up the other night because I was so surprised. Of course you're all right, and I ought never to have been born. I knew all the time that you were spoofing me when you pretended to care for me; but I didn't know you cared for any one else, least of all Wilton. He always seemed so played to me, but then I'm not clever. Only, I advise you not to go hanging round his chambers at night; people are so poor, and they might talk. Let me know if you want me or anything. I won't bother you otherwise.Ted.
Don't mind about me. It's a rotten world, and I'm the rottenest fool in it. I was only hit up the other night because I was so surprised. Of course you're all right, and I ought never to have been born. I knew all the time that you were spoofing me when you pretended to care for me; but I didn't know you cared for any one else, least of all Wilton. He always seemed so played to me, but then I'm not clever. Only, I advise you not to go hanging round his chambers at night; people are so poor, and they might talk. Let me know if you want me or anything. I won't bother you otherwise.
Ted.
He still believed in her, then; only it was more from habit than conviction. But she had destroyed his love for her. She realised these two facts in the same breath, and she rebelled passionately at the loss of the affection that had been hers for so long, though she had valued it so lightly.
"I do want you, now," she scribbled to him in pencil. "Will you come here to-morrow evening? Miss Jennings has promised me the use of her sitting-room. I shall expect you about seven."
It seemed quite in harmony with the general wretchedness of those few days that Phyllis should be seriously ill all the time. The sixty-three working gentlewomen, who had never pretended to care for the brusque shorthand clerk when she was in good health and trampled without a scruple on their tenderest susceptibilities, now went about on tiptoe, and conversed in whispers on all the landings, and got in the way of the doctor when he came downstairs. And they one and all condemned Katharine for her indifference, because she refused to enlarge on the subject at every meal.
"The conversation is never very exhilarating, at the best of times; but when all those women take to gloating over a tragedy, it simply isn't bearable," she was heard to exclaim; and the unlucky remark cost her the last shred of her popularity at Queen's Crescent.
She was waiting at her usual post on the stairs, when they came to tell her that Ted was downstairs. He had come at her bidding;that was consoling, at all events. But when she walked into Miss Jennings' private room and saw his face as he stood on the hearthrug, her heart sank again, and she knew that she was not to find consolation yet. He held out his hand to her silently, and pulled forward a slender, white-wood chair tied up with yellow ribbons, and imperilled a bamboo screen crowded with cheap crockery, and finally sat down himself on the edge of the chintz-covered sofa. Neither of them spoke for a moment or two, and Ted cleared his throat uncomfortably, and stared at the ferrule of his walking-stick.
"I got your letter," he said at last, "and I've come."
"Yes," said Katharine, "you've come."
Having delivered themselves of these two very obvious remarks, they again relapsed into silence; and Katharine glanced at the cuckoo clock, and marvelled that so much concentrated wretchedness could be crowded into something under five minutes.
"Ted," she forced herself to say, in a voice that did not seem to be hers, "Ted, will you never come and see me any more?"
He lifted his head and looked at her; then looked away again.
"Not unless you want me to do anything for you," he said. "I don't want to bother, you see."
She longed to cry out and tell him that he never bothered her; that she wanted to see him more than she wanted anything in the whole world. But something new and strange in his face, that told her he was no longer a boy and no longer her willing slave, seemed to paralyse her. To be proved inferior to the man she had always considered inferior to her, was the hardest blow she had yet had to endure.
"I don't know what you mean," she said, lamely.
Ted hastened to be apologetic.
"I'm beastly sorry," he said, and cleared his throat again.
"I—I wish you would explain," she went on.
"Oh, that's all right, isn't it?" said Ted vaguely.
"It isn't all right; you know it isn't," she cried. "What makes you so strange to me? You've never looked like that before. Is it I who have changed you so, Ted?"
"Oh, it's nothing," he said. "You've hit me up rather, that's all. Don't botherabout me. Did you want me for anything particular?"
She looked in vain for any signs of relenting in his manner; but he sat on the edge of the sofa, and played with his walking-stick, and cleared his throat at intervals. In spite of the changed conditions of their attitude towards one another, she felt that she was expected, as usual, to take the initiative.
"I wanted to tell you all about it, to explain," she faltered. "I thought you would help me."
"If it's all the same to you, I would rather not hear," said Ted, with unexpected promptitude. "I know as much about it as I care to know, thanks.Hewrote to me this morning, too."
"He wrote to you? Paul?"
"Wilton, yes," he replied, shortly, and glanced at her again. His under lip was twitching, as it always did when he was hurt or embarrassed.
"What for?" she asked, wonderingly.
"Oh, to explain, and all that! Hang the explanation! I didn't want him to tell me he hadn't been a blackguard; I knew you,—so that was all square. But I don't understand it now, and I don't want to. I can'tsee any great shakes, myself, in playing about with a girl when you're engaged to some one else. But I suppose that's because I'm such a rotten ass. It's none of my business, any way; only, I think you'd better be careful. But you know best, so that's all right."
Again she longed to tell him that she was not so bad as he thought her, and yet, much worse than he thought her; but the words would not come, and she sat self-condemned.
"You don't understand," she stammered presently. "I didn't know he was engaged till yesterday. I saw no harm in it all; I only liked him very much, as a friend. I liked you in quite a different way, I—"
"You didn't know he was engaged?" said Ted, rousing himself suddenly. "Do you mean to say he has been playing fast and loose with you, the blackguard? If I had thought that—"
"No, no!" she cried, in alarm at the fierceness of his expression. "He never treated me badly; he made everything quite clear from the beginning. It was my fault if I misunderstood him. But I never did; I always knew we were just friends, and it was pleasant, and I let it go on. Haven't you and I beenfriends, too, Ted? There was no harm in that, was there?"
"Oh, no," he said, bitterly. "There was no fear of any harm in it!"
She realised his meaning, and blushed painfully as she felt that he had spoken the truth.
"Ted, do you hate me, I wonder?" she murmured.
"What? Oh, that's all right. Don't bother about me. I was a rotten ass ever to expect anything else."
"But, I mean, because—because of the other?" she went on anxiously.
Ted bit his lip, but did not speak.
"Do you think it was wrong of me?" she pleaded. "Ted, tell me! I didn't know; I didn't really. It seemed quite right to me; I couldn't see that it mattered, just because of what people said. Would you think it wrong of a girl to come and see you, if she liked coming, and didn't care what people said?"
Ted rose from his seat hurriedly, and picked up his hat.
"I never said you were wrong, did I?" he said, gently. "You see, you're clever, and I'm not, and it's altogether different. I was only sorry, that was all; I didn't think youwent in for that sort of thing, and I was hit up, rather. But it was my fault entirely; and of course you're right,—you always are. I sha'n't bother you any more, now I know."
"Ted, don't go," she said, imploringly, as he touched her hand again and turned towards the door. "Don't you understand, Ted, that—thatheonly appealed to half of me, and— I do care, Ted, and I want you to come and see me again; I do really, Ted, I—"
But he only smiled as incredulously as before, and spoke again in the same gentle tone.
"Thanks, awfully. But don't bother to spoof yourself about me; I shall be all right, really. It was always my fault; I won't bother you any more. Good-bye."
And, haunted by his changed manner and his joyless smile, she went back to her seat on the stairs, and sat with her hands clasped over her knees and her eyes staring vacantly into space, as she tried in vain to discover what her real feelings were. "Perhaps I haven't got any," she thought to herself. "Perhaps I am incapable of loving any one, or of feeling anything. And I have sent away the best fellow in the whole world, and it doesn't seem to matter a bit. I wonder ifanythingcould make me cry now?" And she took a gloomy pleasure in conjuring up all the incidents of the last unhappy week, and laughed cynically when she found that none of them had any effect upon her.
"Why don't they light the gas?" complained the working gentlewomen, when they came downstairs to supper. And when Katharine explained that she had promised to light it herself and had forgotten to do so, they passed on their way, marvelling that any one with so little feeling should have her moments of abstraction like every one else. After they had all gone down, she had a restless fit, and paced up and down the landing until Polly Newland came out of the sick room, and stopped her.
"You might choose another landing, if you want to do that," she said, crossly. "You've woke her up now; but you can come in if you like. She has just asked for you."
Katharine followed her in, rather awkwardly, and sat down on the chair that was pointed out to her, and tried to think of something appropriate to say. It was difficult to know how to begin, when she looked round the room, and noted all the objects that seemed to have belonged to some distant period in herlife, before the world had become so hard and cheerless. But Phyllis was looking the same as ever, except that she was rather white, and her hair was strangely tidy. She was the first to speak.
"Hullo," she said. "I've been wanting to see you. What's the matter with you, child?"
The incongruity of being asked by the invalid for the cause of her own malady did not immediately occur to Katharine. But the familiar tone of sympathy went straight to her heart, and she broke down completely. She had a dim notion that Polly remonstrated angrily, and that Polly was sent out of the room; and after that she was conscious of nothing except of the comfort of being able to cry undisturbed, until Phyllis said something about red eyes, and they joined in a spasmodic laugh.
"Poor old girl, what have they been doing to you?" she asked.
"Everything has been horrid," gasped Katharine. "And you were ill, and nobody understood, and oh, Phyllis!—I am aprig!"
Marion Keeley lay in an indolent attitude on the sofa by the window. Her mother was addressing circulars at the writing-table, with the anxious haste of the fashionable woman of business. Both of them looked as though the London season, which a royal wedding had prolonged this year, had been too much for them.
"He is coming again to-night," said Marion, throwing down a letter she had been reading. Her tone was one of dissatisfaction.
"I know," replied her mother. "I asked him to come."
Marion made a gesture of impatience.
"Don't you think," she said, "that you might occasionally, for the sake of variety, wait until his own inclination prompted him to come?"
"I don't understand you," said Mrs. Keeley, absently. "I asked him because I wanted to make final arrangements with him about Lady Suffolk's drawing-room meeting, at which he has promised to speak to-morrow."
"It seems to me," observed Marion sarcastically, "that it would save a lot of trouble if you were to marry him yourself."
"It is very surprising," complained her mother, "how you persist in dragging the frivolous element into everything. If you were only like your cousin, now,—so earnest and so sympathetic! How is it that you are really my daughter?"
"I'm sure I don't know; in fact, I think it is the only subject on which you have allowed me to remain ignorant," returned Marion, calmly. "But you needn't bother about me; I am going out to dinner in any case to-night, so you will be able to make your arrangements with Paul without the distraction of the frivolous element. Meanwhile, can't we have some tea?"
The Honourable Mrs. Keeley returned to her circulars with a sigh.
"One might almost think, to hear you talk, that you did not want to marry him at all," she exclaimed.
"One almost might," assented Marion; and she tore her letter into little pieces, and threw them deftly into the waste-paper basket. Her mother looked at her a little apprehensively.
"How you can, even in fun, pretend to ignorethe merits of a character like Paul Wilton's is beyond my comprehension," she grumbled. "What more can you want in a man, I should like to know?"
"More? I don't want any more; I want a good deal less. I'm not ignoring his merits; I only wish I could. I would give anything to find a few honest human imperfections in him. It is his eternal excellence that is driving me to distraction. What a fool I was ever to let him take me seriously! Of course I never should have done, if he had not provoked me by being so difficult to fascinate. He is one of those awful people who are going to make heaven unbearable!"
"Judging by your aggravating behaviour in this world, you won't be there to help him," said her mother, who was losing her patience rapidly after having wrongly addressed two wrappers.
"I hope I sha'n't. If all the people go to heaven who are popularly supposed to been route, I should think even the saints would be too bored to stop there. As for Paul, I grant you that he is eminently fitted for a son-in-law, but I don't see why I should be the victim of his heaven-sent vocation."
"You are not married to him yet; and ifyou continue in this strain much longer, I doubt if you ever will be."
"Oh," said Marion, with sudden animation, "do you really think thereisa chance of his breaking it off?"
The opportune arrival of Katharine at this moment restored some of Mrs. Keeley's good-humour. She approved very decidedly of Katharine, not only because she was a working-woman, but also on account of her patience as a listener. Katharine, she felt, would have made an ideal daughter; Katharine understood the serious aspect of the political situation, and she showed no signs of being bored when people gave her their opinion of things. So she received her with genuine cordiality.
"I am so glad you have come," said Marion, offering her a perfunctory embrace. "You have interrupted mamma, and made tea inevitable. It is quite providential."
"I am glad to be the unwitting cause of so many blessings," said Katharine drily. "I really came to say good-bye. I am going home to-morrow."
"Holidays already?" exclaimed Mrs. Keeley, as though she grudged even the working gentlewoman her moments of relaxation.
"They have not come too soon for me," observed Katharine, to whom the last six weeks had seemed an endless period of waiting. "But I am leaving town for good; so I suppose I shall not see you again for some time. I mean to say, I have given up my teaching, and—"
"How charming of you!" exclaimed Marion, who felt that the last barrier to a warm friendship with her cousin was now removed. "Are you really going to be like everybody else, now?"
But the Honourable Mrs. Keeley was bitterly disappointed.
"It is incredible," she said. "Do you mean to say that you are going to throw up your life's work, just as you are on the point of being a brilliant success?"
"I think, on the contrary, I have merely been a failure," said Katharine, with a patient smile. "You see, there are hundreds of people who can do just what I am doing. But I am wanted at home, and I am going back to my father; I ought never to have left him."
"Oh, these girls!" sighed Mrs. Keeley. "What is the use of trying to make them independent? And I thought you were so different; I held you up as an example to my own daughter—"
"I am so sorry," murmured Katharine, in parenthesis. Marion only laughed.
"I was proud to own you as my niece," pursued Mrs. Keeley, increasing in fervour as she went on. "You were doing what so few women succeed in doing, and I had the keenest admiration for your courage and your talent. And to give it all up like this! Surely, you have some excellent reason for such an extraordinary course of action?"
"It seems to me quite sufficient reason that I am more wanted at home than here," replied Katharine, with the same air of gentle endurance. She had gone through a similar explanation more than once lately, and it was beginning to blunt the edge of her newly made resolutions. It also took away most of the picturesqueness of being good.
"But, indeed, you are very much mistaken," her aunt continued to urge. "Who has been putting this effete notion ofdutyinto your head? I thought we working-women had buried it for ever! Consider what you are doing in throwing up the position you have carved out for yourself; consider the bad effect it will have upon others, the example,—everything! Your place is theworld, Kitty, the great world! There cannot be any work for you to do in a home like yours."
"There is always plenty to do in the village, and nobody to do it," said Katharine. "I have considered the matter thoroughly, Aunt Alicia, and my mind is quite made up. Anybody can do my work up here in London; you know that is so."
"Indeed, you are mistaken," said her aunt, vehemently. It seemed particularly hard that her favourite protégée should have deserted her principles, just as she had been driven to the last limit of endurance by her own daughter. "Every woman must do her own work, and no one else can do it for her."
"Then why do you always say the labour market is so overcrowded?" asked Marion, making a mischievous application of the knowledge she had so unwillingly absorbed. But she was not heeded.
"It is the mass we have to consider, not the individual," continued the Honourable Mrs. Keeley, as though she were addressing the room from a platform. "It is for lesser women than ourselves to look after the home and the parish; there is a far wider sphere reserved for such as you and I. It would be aperfect scandal if you were to throw yourself away on the narrowness of the domestic circle."
Katharine felt a hysterical desire to laugh, which she controlled with difficulty. She spoke very humbly, instead.
"It must be my own fault, if I have allowed you to think all these things about me," she said. "There is nothing great reserved for me; I am just a complete failure, and that is the end of all my ambition and all my conceit. I wish some one had told me I was conceited, before I got so bad."
The Honourable Mrs. Keeley was silenced at last. None of her experience of working gentlewomen helped her to meet the present situation. A woman with a great future before her had obviously no right to be humble. But Marion realised gleefully that she had gained a new and unexpected ally.
"I always said you were much too jolly to belong to mamma's set," she observed; at which the angered feelings of her mother compelled her to seek comfort in solitude, and she made some excuse for retiring to her boudoir, and left the two rebels together. They looked at one another and broke into mutual merriment. But Marion laughed the loudest,—a fact that she herself was the first to appreciate.
"Kitty," she said suddenly, growing grave, "I am so sorry, dear! What's up, and who has been treating you badly?"
She strolled away immediately to pour out tea, and Katharine had time to recover from surprise at her unusual penetration.
"How did you know?" she asked, slowly.
"I guessed, because—oh, you looked like it, or something! Don't ask me to give a reason for anything I say,please. It isn't my business, of course, and I don't want to know a thing about it if you would rather not tell; only, I'm sorry if you're cut up, that's all. Did you chuck him, or did it never get so far as that? There, I really don't want you to tell me about it. Of course, he was much older than you, and much wickeder, and he flirted atrociously with you and you were taken in by him, you poor little innocent dear! I know all about it, and the way they get hold of girls like you who are not up to their wiles. He was married, too, of course? They always are, the worst ones."
It was too much trouble to correct her assumptions, and Katharine allowed her to go on. After all, her sympathy was genuine, if it was a little crudely expressed.
"I shouldn't think any more about him,if I were you," continued Marion. "They're not worth it, any of them; go and get another, and snap your fingers at the first. You're not tied to one, as I am."
"No," said Katharine, scalding herself with mouthfuls of boiling tea. "I'm not."
"I know I would give anything to get rid of mine," said Marion sorrowfully. "May you never know the awful monotony of being engaged!"
"I don't fancy I ever shall," observed Katharine.
"Always the same writing on the breakfast table," sighed Marion; "always the same face on the back seat of the carriage; always the same photograph all over the house,—oh, it's maddening! You wouldn't be able to stand it for a day, Kitty!"
"Perhaps not," said Katharine. "Then your engagement is publicly announced now?"
"I should rather think so! I am tired of being congratulated by a lot of idiots, who don't even take the trouble to find out whether I want to be married or not. And then, the boys! Bobby is going to shoot himself, he says; but of course Bobby always says that. And Jack has gone to South Africa; I don't exactly know why, except that everyone goes to South Africa when there isn't any particular reason for staying in town. And Tommy—you remember Tommy, don't you? He was my best boy for ever so long; I rather liked Tommy. Well, he has gone and married that stupid Ethel Humphreys, and he always said shepinched. I know why he did it, too. He was being objectionably serious, one day, and said he would do anything on earth for me; so I asked him to go and marry mamma, because then I should get eight hundred a year. And he didn't like it a bit; Tommy always was ridiculously hot-tempered. Oh, dear, I'm sick of it all! I believe you're the only person I know, who hasn't congratulated me."
"Apparently, you do not consider yourself a subject for congratulation," said Katharine, smiling faintly.
"Oh, you're not like all the others, and I should like to be congratulated by you. You would mean what you said, anyhow."
"I certainly should," exclaimed Katharine.
"How earnestly you said that! It's frightfully nice of you to care so much, though. I was telling Paul what a good sort you were, the other day, and he quite agreed."
"Wasn't it rather dull for him?"
"Oh, no, I'm sure it wasn't; he takes a tremendous interest in you; he says you are the cleverest woman he knows, and the pluckiest. He does, really!"
"I have no doubt of it. He has always thought me clever and plucky," said Katharine.
"Well, it's more than he thinks about me, anyhow," said Marion ruefully. "He doesn't think I am good for anything, except to play with."
"And to fall in love with," added Katharine softly.
"Why didn't you come and meet him the other evening?" continued Marion. "He seemed so disappointed. So was I; I wanted you to come, for lots of reasons. I get so bored when I am left alone with him! I like him ever so much better if there is some one else there; and you are the only girl I know who would be safe not to flirt with him. Bobby said, only the other day, that you were much too nice to flirt with. And girls are so mean, sometimes,—aren't they? I was really sorry when you refused."
"If you had told me the real reason for your invitation, instead of the conventional one, Imight have made more effort to come," said Katharine.
"You old dear, don't be sarcastic; I never can endure sarcasm. But you will come next time, won't you? Oh, dear, I am forgetting all about your own trouble; what a selfish wretch I am! Are you sure there is nothing I can do for you?"
"Nothing, thanks; at least, nothing I would let you do."
"Sure? Well, let me know if there is. Are you really very gone on him, Kitty?"
"Please don't," said Katharine.
"All right, I won't. But I wish you would try a course of boys for a time; it would make you feel so much happier. They're so fresh and harmless."
"Even when they shoot themselves?" said Katharine.
"Oh, that's only Bobby. Must you really go? You old dear, you have done me such a lot of good. What is it, Williams?"
Mr. Wilton was in the library, the man announced, and would be glad to see either Mrs. Keeley or her daughter for a moment, and he would rather not come upstairs, as he was in a hurry. Marion gave a petulant little stamp.
"Oh, send mamma to him! How like Paul, not to care which of us he sees! Just fancy, if it were Tommy, now! Stop, though, show him up here, Williams. You will be able to congratulate him, Kitty; it will put him in a good humour. Oh, nonsense! you can wait just for that, and I haven't anything to say to him that he hasn't heard hundreds of times before."
So Katharine found herself shaking hands with him once more, and congratulating him on being engaged to her cousin, Marion Keeley. She had not seen him since the night of the thunderstorm, when he had stood in the old doorway in Essex Court, with the lamplight on his face.
"You are very good; it is kind of you to take so much interest," he was saying with frigid politeness.
They were silent after that, and Marion said she was sure they must have crowds to talk about, and she would go upstairs and ask her mother about Lady Suffolk's drawing-room meeting; and they both made perfectly futile efforts to keep her in the room, and were ashamed of having made them when she had gone, and they were left to face the situation alone.
"I suppose," said Paul, with an effort, "that your holidays will soon be beginning?"
"They have begun to-day," said Katharine. "This is the first day—of my last holidays."
"Your—last holidays?" She felt, without seeing, that he had looked up sharply at her.
"I don't suppose it will interest you," she went on, rousing herself to be more explicit; "but I am giving up my work in London, and going home for good."
There was the slightest perceptible pause before he spoke.
"Would you care to tell me why?"
"Because," said Katharine slowly, "I happened to find out, through a friend, that I was a prig; and I am going home to try and learn not to be a prig any more." She was looking straight at him as she finished speaking. His face was quite incomprehensible just then.
"Was that a true friend?" he asked.
"People who tell us unpleasant things about ourselves are always said to be our true friends, are they not?" she said, evasively.
"That is not an answer to my question; I was not dealing in generalities when I asked it. But of course, you have every right to withhold the answer, if it pleases you—"
"I don't think I know the answer," saidKatharine. "I have always found your questions too difficult to answer; and as to this one,—I wish I could be sure that it was a friend at all." He moved his chair, involuntarily, a little nearer hers.
"Can I do anything to make you feel more sure?" he asked.
She shook her head, and he moved away again. "Of course, you are the best judge in the matter," he resumed, more naturally; "but it is rather a serious step to take at the outset of your career, is it not?"
"Perhaps," she said, indifferently; "but then, I am not a man, you see. There is no career possible for a woman, because her feelings are always more important to her than all the ambition in the world. A man only draws on his feelings for his recreation; but a woman makes them the whole business of her life, and that is why she never gets on. I don't suppose you can realise this, because it is so different for you. Everybody expects a man to get on; it is made comparatively easy for him, and nobody ever disputes his way of doing it. A man can have as much fun as he likes, as long as he isn't found out,—and it's easy for a man not to be found out," she added, with a sigh.
"Easier than for a woman?" He spoke in the bantering tone that was so familiar to her.
"Oh, a woman is dogged by detectives from her cradle, mostly drawn from the ranks of her own sex. It is a compliment we pay ourselves, in one sense. We dare not inquire into the private life of a man, because of the iniquities he is supposed to practise; but there is so little scandal attached to a woman's name, that we are anxious not to miss any of it." She laughed at her small attempt to be frivolous, and Paul brightened considerably. He could understand her when she was in this mood, and his peace of mind was undisturbed by it.
"I suppose the man is still unborn who will take the trouble to champion his sex, and explain that men are not all profligates before they are married," he observed. "I wonder why women always think of us as cads, and then take us for husbands. I can't think why they want to marry us at all, though."
"And we can't think what reason there is for you to offerusmarriage, unless you do it for position or something like that," retorted Katharine, and then bit her lip and stopped short, as she realised what she had said. In the embarrassing pause that followed, Marion came back into the room.
"Well, you two don't look as though you'd had much conversation," she remarked.
"We haven't," said Katharine, getting up to leave. "Mr. Wilton's conversation, you see, is all bespoken already."
"Miss Austen is a little hard on me," said Paul. "I have had so little practice in conversation with brilliant and learned young lecturers, that—"
"That I will leave you to a less dismal companion," interrupted Katharine, a little abruptly.
"Will you allow me to suggest," he went on, as he held her hand for a moment, "that you should try and think more kindly of the particular friend who was so unpleasantly frank to you?"
"If I thought that the friend in question were likely to be affected by my opinion of him, perhaps I might," she said, as she turned away.
When she had gone, Marion asked him what he had meant.
"Merely a passing reflection on something she had been telling me," was his reply.
"Oh," said Marion, "did she tell you about her love affair?"
"My dear girl, Miss Austen is not likely to favour me with these interesting disclosures, isshe? I didn't know she had a love affair, as you rather frankly express it."
"She isn't a bit the sort, is she? I only found it out this afternoon; he's an awful beast, I should think,—led her on, and treated her villainously, poor old Kitty! Isn't it a shame?"
"Did she tell you all that?"
"Don't look so surprised! Of course she did; at least, I guessed, because she looked so miserable. I always know; I've had so much experience, you see. But it's much worse for Kitty, don't you know, because she takes things so seriously. It's a mistake, isn't it? I would give a good lot to meet the man who has ill treated her, though!"
"Yes? What would you do to him?"
"I would tell him he was a horrid little bounder, and that Kitty was well rid of him."
"In which case there is no occasion to pity her, is there?"
"Oh, how unsympathetic you are! Of course it's just as bad, whatever the man is like. It's always the saints like Kitty who break their hearts for the most worthless men. I'm not made like that; I should soon console myself with some one else, and make the first one mad. But then, I'm not clever."
"Your cousin is a most interesting psychological study," said Paul vaguely.
"What do you mean? She is a very nice girl indeed," cried Marion indignantly; and Paul silently condemned the whole sex, without reservation.
It was a particularly bright and sunny evening when Katharine returned to her home,—a failure. She felt that, to be appropriate, it should have been dull and dreary; but it was on the contrary quite at variance with her feelings, and she grew unaccountably happier in spite of herself, as the train sped past the familiar landmarks on the way and brought her nearer every minute to the home of her childhood. For there was a sneaking consideration for herself in her sudden desire to serve others; she had felt out of tune with the world since it had been the means of revealing her deficiencies to herself, and she longed for the panacea of home sympathy, which was still connected in her mind with the days when she had been supreme in a small circle, a circle that believed in her if it did not precisely understand her. She had found something wanting in the sympathies and interests which had absorbed her for the last two years, and she turned instinctively to those earlier ones which may haveoffered her no great allurements at the time, but which at least contained no rude awakenings. She forgot the petty discomforts and frequent annoyances of her life at home, in her present desire for rest and peace; she was tired of fighting hard for her happiness and gaining nothing but a moiety of pleasure in return; and the weary condition of mind and body in which she found herself at the end of it all, probably helped her to exaggerate the advantages of that former existence of hers, and to mistake its monotony for restfulness.
She had her first disillusionment as she hastened out of the station. It was no one's fault that the Rector had been obliged to attend a meeting of the archæological society, and that Miss Esther had been detained in the village; but they had never omitted to meet her before, and that they should have done so on this particular occasion which was of so much import to her, appeared in the light of a bad omen, and she set it down sadly as another penalty that she was to pay for having neglected her real duty so long. But she had yet to learn that her ardent desire to sacrifice herself for somebody did not bring with it the necessary opportunity, and it was not encouraging to discover that no one was particularly anxiousto be the recipient of her good works, and that her effort at well-doing was more resented by those in authority than her previous and undisguised course of self-indulgence. Even Miss Esther mistrusted her enthusiasm, and evidently looked upon it as another freak on the part of her capricious niece, which would probably prove as transient as the last; and Katharine felt that she was touching the extreme limits of her endurance in the first few days she spent at the Rectory.
"It is very hard," she complained to herself when she had been home about a week, "that they should make it so much easier for me to be bad than good. All the same," she added, with a touch of her old defiant spirit, "I am going to be good, whether they like it or not!"
Ivingdon was one of those villages, common to the chalk district, that cease to possess any charm in the wet weather. The small ranges of round-topped hills which formed the only feature in the flat green stretches of country entirely lost the few characteristics they possessed, in the absence of sunshine, and presented neither charm nor majesty in the heavy grey atmosphere that surrounded them. The landscape appeared even less inspiriting than usual to Katharine, on a rainy day in the late autumn, as she plodded through the most squalid part of the village, and prepared to walk home through a kind of mist that had none of the exhilarating qualities of the stormy rain that always appealed to her. After four months of dull and virtuous renunciation, such a day as this was likely to hasten the reaction that had become inevitable. It was tea time when she reached the Rectory; and the aspect of the precisely arranged table, with its rigid erectionof double dahlias in the middle, and the starched figure of Miss Esther at the head of it, completed the feeling of revulsion in her mind.
"My dear," said her aunt, as Katharine flung herself into a chair, "have you no intention of making yourself tidy before we begin?"
"My only intention is that of having tea as speedily as possible," replied Katharine. "If Peter Bunce, or any other depressing personage is likely to turn up, he may as well see me in my wet weather hat as in anything else. Besides, I rather like myself in my wet weather hat, in spite of the disapproval it has excited among the gods of the neighbourhood."
She waited instinctively for the reproof that usually came as an accompaniment to her criticism of the neighbourhood; but Miss Esther for once was preoccupied, and allowed her to go on undisturbed. "Mrs. Jones has got another baby," continued Katharine. "That's the seventh. And Farmer Rickard seems to have seized the opportunity to turn her husband off for the winter. There positively isn't another scrap of news,—so may I have some tea?"
"Talking of babies," observed the Rector,looking up from his book, "I heard this morning that some one was going to be married. Now, whoever could it have been, I wonder!"
"I didn't know," said Katharine, "that any one was left to be married in this village, above the age of sixteen."
"Ah, to be sure," continued the Rector, smiling at his unusual effort of memory, "it was your cousin Marion. You remember Alicia Keeley, do you not, Esther? Well, this is her daughter; they both came to stay with us some years ago, if you remember; and she is to be married to a barrister, whose name—my child, that is the third time I have passed you the butter, and you have already helped yourself twice—whose name is Paul Wilton. It's very odd," he added, with his nervous laugh, "but, although the name is perfectly familiar to me, I do not seem to recollect the man in the least. The only Wilton I can recall with certainty is the exceedingly able and scholarly author of our best work on copper tokens; but—"
"Well, this is his son, of course, Cyril," interrupted Miss Esther impatiently. "I should not have thought it required much effort to remember the man who enjoyed yourhospitality for at least two months. A very nice young man he was, too,—of an excellent family, and with a delicate regard for propriety which was most fortunate considering the embarrassing circumstances in which we were placed at the time. So he is going to marry into the family? What a coincidence! I don't remember much about Marion, she was so young when she stayed here; but if she has grown up at all like that terribly advanced mother of hers, poor Mr. Wilton will have his hands full. How did he meet her, I wonder? Did you ever see him in Curzon street, Katharine?"
"Sometimes; they were engaged early in the summer. But it isn't a bit important, is it?" said Katharine.
"You knew they were engaged, and you have kept it to yourself all this time?" exclaimed her aunt. "I really think you are the most exasperating girl, Katharine!"
"Why? I suppose it is rather cruel, though, to rob any one of the smallest piece of gossip, in a place like this," observed Katharine sarcastically.
"To be sure! to be sure! I remember him perfectly," the Rector was chuckling gleefully. "A delightful young fellow, with some knowledge of Oriental china. We must send thema little present, my dear,—something he would be able to appreciate. There is a delightful Elizabethan chest at Walker's—"
"I see no necessity for a wedding present at all," interrupted Miss Esther. "We only know him very slightly, and we haven't seen the Keeleys for years. If Katharine likes to send her cousin a little remembrance, that is her own affair and she can do as she likes," she added, with a princely condescension. "I really wonder, Cyril, that you can make such an extravagant suggestion, with the poor crying out at your very doors!"
The Rector reflected on the beauty of the old oak chest he had coveted for weeks, and sighed deeply. Katharine roused herself, and laughed in a distinctly forced manner.
"Send them your blessing, auntie," she said; "and congratulate Mr. Wilton on his good fortune in entering our particular family. I am sure it must be an alliance he has coveted ever since he first made our acquaintance! It will only cost a penny stamp, and I am sure the poor of the village will not grudge that for such a laudable object. Hey-day, do let us talk about something else! Do you know the Grange is put up for sale?"
"You don't say so!" exclaimed Miss Esther,who was as easily diverted as a child. "Dear me! and poor Mrs. Morton hardly laid to her last rest! The want of feeling that that young Edward has shown throughout is almost incredible. To requite the lifelong devotion of his mother by selling her old home a month after her death! Ah, well, I suppose we have all done our work here, and it is time for us to follow her!"
"What rubbish!" cried Katharine hotly. "Why should he pretend to be fond of his mother just because she is dead? She was never a bit fond of him, when she was alive, and he wanted her affection badly enough then. Besides, it can't matter to her whether the house is sold or not, and I expect he wants the money."
"Money? Why, she has left him every penny she had,—so what more can he want? I know she did, for a fact, because the housekeeper told me so."
"I shouldn't dream of disputing such an excellent authority, but I do know her generosity was purely accidental, and that she would have made another will if she had not been taken ill so suddenly," said Katharine, getting up and walking to the window. The view outside, with the sodden lawn and the drippingtrees, was as cheerless as the conversation within.
"The house ought not to be allowed to stand," said the Rector, with an indignation that he never bestowed on the human imperfections so bitterly deplored by his sister. "A wretched modern thing, belonging to the very worst period of domestic art!"
"They are doing it up," said Katharine from the window. "I wonder," she added softly to the sodden lawn and the dripping trees, "if he knows that they have mended the gap in the hedge?" Perhaps it was only the dulness of the weather that was depressing her, but her eyes, as she laid her cheek against the window-pane, were full of tears. Miss Esther continued her speculations unconsciously.
"I suppose he will travel," she said. "It amounts to seven hundred a year, the housekeeper told me; and I'm sure it's seven hundred more than he deserves, the unfeeling fellow!"
"It isn't his fault that he didn't get on with his mother," said Katharine. "People can't choose their relations, can they? And I'm sure, under the present system, every obstacle is put in the way of our hitting it off with our own people."
She was almost surprised at her own vehemence in Ted's defence. She had never seen him since the day he had called on her in Queen's Crescent and rejected the affection she so tardily offered him, and the smart of that rejection was still present with her, gently as he had expressed it; but she could no more suppress her old instinct of protection for him than she could control her thoughts.
"I find it quite impossible to understand you, when you are in these heartless moods," said her aunt crossly.
"Am I heartless?" said Katharine, with her eyes still full of tears. "I suppose that must be it; I wondered what was the matter with me this afternoon. Of course I am in one of my heartless moods. Oh, dear, how stupid it all is!" She sighed desperately, and turned away from the dreary outlook. "I'm sorry I didn't gather any more news in my excursion to the village," she went on presently, with an obvious effort to be agreeable. "Oh, I forgot,—I met the doctor."
"Yes? What had he to say for himself?" asked Miss Esther, whose dignity was always subject to her curiosity.
"He asked me to marry him, and I refused," answered Katharine; and she brokeinto a peal of laughter at the immediate effect of her words.
"What? Really, Katharine, you are perfectly incorrigible," said Miss Esther, in a tone that was expressive rather of incredulity than of disapproval.
"It's very odd," observed Katharine, "that one has only to tell the truth to be disbelieved. And I'm sure I was very sorry to be obliged to refuse him, because I felt there was no one else in the place he could possibly ask. Poor doctor!"
Miss Esther said a rapid grace to show how outraged she felt, and walked out of the room without another word. Katharine sighed once more and looked across at her father, who was apparently absorbed in his book and oblivious of what had been passing. But Katharine's acquaintance with the world, short as it had been, had considerably widened her vision, and she knew somehow as she looked at him that he was not reading at that moment.
"Daddy, dear daddy!" she cried, impetuously, "I couldn't help it this afternoon, I couldn't, really! I believe I have a devil in me some days, and this is one of them. Daddy, forgive me for being so selfish and horrid; I hate myself for my abominable temper,I do indeed. I think I have never been so miserable in my whole life before!"
"My child, what is it? I don't think I quite understand," said the Rector gently. She came and sat on the arm of his chair, and he stroked her hair mechanically.
"Of course you don't,—how should you?" she exclaimed, half laughing to hide the shake in her voice. "But I wish I knew why I have these bad fits; I would do just anything to get better, butI can't! When I don't feel wretched I feel absurd, and that's ever so much worse. Why is it that I feel like this, daddy?"
"Shall we send for the doctor?" asked the Rector innocently; and he wondered why she seemed amused.
"I don't fancy he would care to come just yet," she said, demurely. They were silent for a few moments. The Rector asked her presently if she would like to go away again.
"I don't know; I don't seem to want anything. Ivingdon is intolerable; but I said I would endure it for your sake, and it seems so feeble merely to have failed again. After all, I haven't done the least atom of good by giving up my work and coming home, have I?"
The Rector remembered many incidents in the last four months, and did not contradict her; but his silence was so habitual to him that she hardly noticed it.
"Self-sacrifice is all very well in theory," she went on disconsolately, "but if nobody wants you to sacrifice yourself, what's the good of it? I don't believe there is a single Christian virtue that works properly, when you come to practise it; and I've wasted four good months in finding it out. Oh, dear, what a mortal idiot I've been! I wish you understood, daddy," she added wistfully.
"I'm not sure that I don't, Kitty," he said tentatively, and waited to be contradicted.
"I believe you do; I believe you always have understood!" she cried. "But I always expect too much from people, and I never can take any one on trust. How I can be so unlike you is a mystery to me."
"You are like your dear mother, bless her," said the Rector with unconscious humour; and they became silent again.
"Do you know," she went on presently, "if you'd promise not to mind, daddy, I half think I'd like to go away again, for a while. I've still got some money, you know, and I might try Paris, or some new place. Itseems hopeless to stay on here, and worry Aunt Esther by everything I do or say; I know she considers me the cross she has to bear, but it seems a waste of Christian resignation, doesn't it?"
"Paris?" said the Rector with animation. "By all means go to Paris,—the most delightful place in the world! When I was a boy in Paris— Dear, dear, how it all comes back to me! That was before I was ordained, to be sure; ah, those were days to be remembered! I can give you an introduction to a friend of mine in Paris, Monsieur—Monsieur— Ah, it's gone now. But I can tell you the names of all his books. A charming fellow; knew everything and did everything; there was nothing too daring for him in those days. You'll get on with him, Kitty; the most delightful companion a man could have, in fact!" The old Rector was laughing like a schoolboy at his reminiscences.
"That's all very well," said Katharine rather cruelly; "but what will Aunt Esther say?"
"Ah," said the Rector, looking about him apprehensively, "there is certainly Esther to be considered."
"Yes, there is!" sighed Katharine. Andshe added impetuously, "Poor daddy! what a saint you must have been all these years! I wonder why I never realised it before?"
"Oh, no," said the Rector, smiling. "I'm nothing but an old fool, who was never fit to have a daughter at all. Your mother ought to have left me to vegetate among my books, bless her heart!"
Katharine looked at him reflectively.
"I am beginning to understand," she said, in her quaint, thoughtful manner. "It has puzzled me all these months, but you have made it come quite clear at last. I see now what they meant by calling me a prig: it is because I have none of the qualities that would prevent you from ever becoming one."
"A prig?" said her father inquiringly.
"Ah," said Katharine, "it is something of too modern a growth to have come within your ken." She slipped off her seat, and began pacing restlessly up and down the room.
"A prig," she continued, more to herself than to her father, who was watching her narrowly nevertheless, "a prig is one who tries to break what the ordinary person is pleased to call the law of Nature, and to substitute the law of his own reason instead. It doesn't matter that this is what we are brought up todo, for the ordinary person insists on our forgetting that we are intelligent beings, and only wants us to run in the same rut as himself. And the ordinary person is very happy, so perhaps he is right. Education makes us all prigs, and we have to sit and wait for the particular experience that is to undo the effects of our education. It is great waste of time to be educated, isn't it? We are told that it is priggish to have ideals, and that is why being young is generally equivalent to being priggish. The world won't tolerate ideals; it sneers at us for trying to find out new ways of being good, and it likes to see us for ever grubbing among the same old ways of being bad. Did you know all this before, daddy? But you never told me, did you? Do parents ever tell their children anything useful, I wonder? Oh, I don't think so; we just have to go on until we find it all out, and break our hearts over it, most likely!" She paused to give a little bitter laugh. The Rector had an intent look on his face that was foreign to it. "I should like to know," she went on, more gently, "if it isn't possible to be brave, or steadfast, or true, without being a prig; it simply means that we have got to go on trying to be better than we are, and pretending thatwe don't know it all the while. It is such an anomalous position for a thinking person, isn't it? And yet, if we are honest about it we proclaim ourselves prigs at once.Iam a prig, daddy. Did you know that too? I have gloried all my life in being above the ordinary littlenesses of womanhood; and then, when my hour came, I just learned that I was the same old woman after all. I was proud of knowing so much, and all the time I did not know what every ignorant woman in the world could have told me. Oh, the world is right, after all; I know it! But it has such uncomfortable ways of convincing us, hasn't it? I'm not bothering you, daddy, am I?" She stopped, and looked at him anxiously. The Rector did not speak. "Nothing will ever make you a prig," continued Katharine as she resumed her restless walk, "or Ted either, or Marion Keeley. Lovable people are never priggish, are they? Oh, I am never going to try to be anything, again. I shall become as much like the ordinary person as I can; I will let boys like Monty make love to me, and pretend that I like it; I will let myself go, and hide away my old feelings which were real ones, and invent a whole set of new ones for everyday use. Oh, dear, howabsurd it all is! To make one's life a long course of deception, in order to prove to the world that we are real! And yet, that is the only way to avoid being called a prig. It is ridiculous to pretend that we care for what the big people think of us. We don't. It is the little, commonplace, ordinary folk, with the commonplace minds and the commonplace views, who make up our audience; and we acknowledge it all our lives by being afraid of their criticism. We play to them, and to them only, from the moment we begin to think for ourselves, until Providence is good enough to ring down the curtain. We make a wretched compromise with our real selves, in order to get through life without being laughed at for taking it seriously. And the end of it all is that we have to suffer our own contempt, instead of the commonplace person's. But everybody does the same, so it must be right, mustn't it? Daddy," she added suddenly, as she came to a standstill before him, "daddy, do you think, if I don't try to be good any more, that I shall ever become just an ordinary pleasant person,—someone whom people will care to fall in love with? It would be so comforting to feel that people cared to fall in love with me. I am so tired of being thoughtclever and nothing else; cleverness seems like a kind of blight that helps one to miss the biggest thing in life. At least, I have missed it, and everybody says I am clever. Why don't you answer me, daddy? Why, daddy! I—I do believe you're crying!"
"No, my child, you are mistaken," said Cyril Austen hastily. "I have been overworking my eyes lately, that is all. You mustn't talk like that, little girl; it—it makes me unhappy. I should never have allowed you to go away by yourself, should I? I'm a useless old— But there, it is too late now. Let us talk about this Paris plan of yours. What if I were to come too, eh?"
"It would be beautiful!" cried Katharine. "But there is still Aunt Esther, isn't there?"
"Ah, yes!" said the Rector ruefully. "So stupid of me to forget!"
They made themselves very happy for a day or two over the Paris plan. They met like guilty conspirators when Miss Esther was out of the way, and amused themselves by arranging a scheme which they knew quite well she would never allow them to carry out. Katharine's spirits recovered something of their old vigour; and Miss Esther felt more bewildered than ever when she suddenly appearedin this new mood, and refused to have anything more to do with the parish.
"I am tired of good works," she announced vigorously. "They don't answer, and they destroy one's self-respect. Some people are cut out for that sort of thing, but I am not, and I am going to leave it to those who are. I am never again going to make myself uncomfortable by visiting people in their unpleasant homes. I don't want to go, for one thing; and it isn't good for them to be patronised, for another. Besides, they can't refuse to see me in any case, and I don't like forcing myself upon people in that uninvited manner. I am going to be happy in my own way, and that will give them a much fairer chance of being happy in theirs. I've done with the whole thing." And she returned cheerfully to the map of Paris.
But her new-found contentment was not to be allowed a long duration. A letter came for her a few days later, which altered the whole aspect of affairs, and finally quenched the Paris plan. The writing was unfamiliar to her, and she had to turn to the end of the closely written pages to discover who had sent it to her.
"Dear Miss Austen," it ran:—