And there had been many hours of high reward.  Kitty had thrown herself at first upon William’s mother with all the effusion possible.  She had been docile, caressing, brilliant.  Lady Tranmore had become almost as proud of her gifts, her social effect, and her fast advancing beauty as Ashe himself.  Kitty’s whims and humors; her passion for this person, and her hatred of that; her love of splendor and indifference to debt; her contempt of opinion and restraint, seemed to her, as to Ashe, the mere crude growth of youth.  When she looked at Ashe, so handsome, agreeable, and devoted, at his place and prestige in the world, his high intelligence and his personal attraction, Ashe’s mother must needs think that Kitty’s mere cleverness would soon reveal to her her extraordinary good-fortune; and that whereas he was now at her feet, she before long would be at his.

Three years!  Lady Tranmore looked back upon them with feelings that wavered like smoke before a wind.  A year of excitement, a year of illness, a year of extravagance, shaken moreover by many strange gusts of temper and caprice, it was so she might have summarized them.  First, a most promising debut in London.  Kitty welcomed on all hands with enthusiasm as Ashe’s wife and her own daughter-in-law, feted to the top of her bent, smiled on at Court, flattered by the country-houses, always exquisitely dressed, smiling and eager, apparently full of ambition for Ashe no less than for herself, a happy, notorious, busy little person, with a touch of wildness that did but give edge to her charm and keep the world talking.

Then, the birth of the boy, and Kitty’s passionate, ungovernable recoil from the deformity that showed itself almost immediately after his birth—­a form of infantile paralysis involving a slight but incurable lameness.  Lady Tranmore could recall weeks of remorseful fondling, alternating with weeks of neglect; continued illness and depression on Kitty’s part, settling after a while into a petulant melancholy for which the baby’s defect seemed but an inadequate cause; Ashe’s tender anxiety, his willingness to throw up Parliament, office, everything, that Kitty might travel and recover; and those huge efforts by which she and his best friends in the House had held him back—­when Kitty, it seemed, cared little or nothing whether he sacrificed his future or not.  Finally, she herself, with the assistance of a new friend of Kitty’s, had become Kitty’s nurse, had taken her abroad when Ashe could not be spared, had watched over her, and humored her, and at last brought her back—­so the doctors said—­restored.

Was it really recovery?  At any rate, Lady Tranmore was often inclined to think that since the return to London—­now about a twelvemonth since—­both she and William had had to do with a different Kitty.  Young as she still was, the first exquisite softness of the expanding life was gone; things harder, stranger, more inexplicable than any which those who knew her best had yet perceived, seemed now and then to come to the surface, like wreckage in a summer sea.