“It is good enough, Fanny,” urged Kitty; “only, you see, we like it and can eat it, but Aunt Pike can’t.  You know the last time she was here she said everything gave her indigestion—­”

“Them folks that is so afflicted,” said Fanny, “should stay in their own ’omes, or the ’ospital.  I’m sure master don’t want patients indoors so well as out, and be giving up the food out of his own mouth to them.  The bit of fish I’ve got for master I’m going to keep for master.  If anybody’s got to have the indigestion it won’t be him, not if I knows it; he’s had nothing to eat to-day yet to speak of, and if nobody else don’t consider him, well, I must,” and with this parting thrust Fanny left the kitchen to go to her bedroom.

Kitty longed to be able to depart to her room too, to lock herself in and fasten out all the worries and bothers, and all thoughts of supper and Aunt Pike, and everything else that was worrying.  “I wish I had stayed in the woods,” she thought crossly; “there would be peace there at any rate,” and her mind wandered away to the river and the little silvery bays, and the tree-covered slopes rising up and up, and she tried to picture it as it must be looking then at that moment, so still, and lonely, and mysterious.

“I’ll see that it all looks nice, Miss Kitty,” said Emily with unusual graciousness.  She felt really sorry for Kitty and the position she was in, and having quite made up her mind to leave now that this new and very different mistress had come, she was not only beginning already to feel a little sad at the thought of parting from them all, but a lively desire to side with them against the common enemy.  She failed quite to realize that her past behaviour had reconciled Kitty more than anything to the “enemy’s” presence, and made her coming almost a relief.  “I’ll get Fanny to poach some eggs, or make an omelette or something.  Don’t you worry about it.”

Kitty, immensely relieved and only too glad to follow Emily’s last bit of advice, wandered out and through the yard towards the garden.  She felt she could not go back to the company of Aunt Pike again, for a few moments at any rate.

Prue was standing with her head out of her window, anxiously wondering where Jabez was with her supper.  Kitty spoke to her and passed on.  She strolled slowly up the steps, past the fateful garden wall and the terrace above to the next terrace, where stood a pretty creeper-covered summer-house.  It was a warm night, and very still and airless.  Kitty sat down on the step in the doorway of the summer-house, and staring before her into the dimness, tried to grasp all that had happened, and what it would mean to them.  She thought of their lazy mornings, when they lay in bed till the spirit moved them to get up; of the other mornings when they chose to rise early and go for a long walk to Lantig, or down to Trevoor, the stretch of desolate moorland which lay about a mile outside the town, and was so full of surprises—­of