Her father, though most reluctantly, had agreed to the plan, because he could see no prospect of peace or happiness for her at home.  He very often in those days sighed deeply from a heavy heart, for his home was very different from what he had hoped it would be.  It was true that things were more orderly, but the old careless joyousness, the muddle and confusion, seemed now vastly preferable.

Aunt Pike had never approved of Kitty.  Her careless, dreamy nature was a constant offence in her eyes; her sudden impulses, her want of concentration, her idle moods, when she sat just thinking and thinking and doing nothing, irritated Mrs. Pike beyond endurance.  They were as opposite to each other in tastes and natures as any two persons could be, and neither could understand or make allowance for the other.  And Dr. Trenire, seeing all this, and how they irritated and annoyed each other, saw how bad it was, too, for Kitty’s character, and at last consented, though very, very reluctantly, to Mrs. Pike’s strongly-urged proposals that Kitty should be sent to a boarding-school.

Poor Kitty!  If ever there was in this world one poor little mortal more stricken with home-sickness than another, that poor little mortal was Kitty.  She loved every inch of the house and garden, of Gorlay, and of her county, and every person and animal who made up her home and her home life—­loved all, too, with such an intensity that she felt it would be utterly impossible to live day after day away from them.

It was a relief to her to hear that the school she was to go to was no farther off than Plymouth, but beyond that she took no interest in it, for the school was of Mrs. Pike’s selecting, and wicked Kitty detested it before she even knew anything about it, and made up her mind to go on detesting it, no matter what it turned out to be.  To her it was simply a prison, and she could not and would not try to love her jailers.  She felt, too, a conviction that her aunt would have told Miss Pidsley, the headmistress, all the story of the suspicion which had rested on her, and told it from her own point of view, of course.

There was one good outcome of the resentment Kitty bore her aunt for “getting her sent away,” as she put it—­it made her determine not to let Mrs. Pike see how much she felt it, and so helped her to bear up bravely.  Helped her, that is, to bear up by day, but oh the nights!  Oh, those long, miserable nights of heart-break and homesickness, when the pain was so intense as almost to drive her to appeal on her knees to Aunt Pike to let her stay at home, to promise abjectly to be and do all that she could wish.  And there were those other terrible moments, too, when misery nearly drove her to tell the truth about Anna and Lettice.

Those were, perhaps, the hardest impulses of all to fight, for she knew that but to speak would mean, probably, that she would be considered fit to remain in her home, and Anna it would be who would be sent away.