“You are quite too audacious—­” she was beginning, when a slim young cornet came back from the billiard-room.

“The Colonel wants you, Mrs. Ormonde,” he said; “and you too, De Burgh.  We are not enough for pool, and you play a capital game, Mrs. Ormonde.”

“What are the stakes?” asked De Burgh, rising readily enough.

“Oh, I can’t play well at all,” said Mrs. Ormonde, following him with evident reluctance.  “Certainly not when Colonel Ormonde is looking on.”

“Oh, never mind him.  I’ll screen you from his hypercritical eyes,” returned De Burgh, as he held the door open for her to pass out.

So it was, after a spell of heavenly tranquility, as Katherine and her mother were on their way to England, intending to make a home in or near London, Mrs. Liddell had been struck down with fever, and Katherine was left unspeakably desolate.  Then she turned to her old friend Mr. Newton, and found him of infinite use and comfort.

A short space of numb inaction followed, during which she fully realized the loneliness of her position, and from which she roused herself to plan her future.

At the time Mrs. Liddell was first attacked with fever they had just renewed their acquaintance with a Miss Payne, whom they had met in Rome and at Berlin.  She was not unknown in society, for she came of a good old county family, and was half-sister of the Bertie whose name has already appeared in these pages.

Their father, with an old man’s pride in a handsome only son, had left the bulk of his fortune to Bertie, while Hannah, who had ministered to his comfort and borne his ill-humor, inherited only a paltry couple of hundred a year, with a fairly well furnished house in Wilton Street, Hyde Park.  Her brother would have willingly added to this pittance, but she sternly refused to accept what did not of right belong to her.  Bertie went with his regiment to India, whence he returned a wiser, a poorer, and a physically weaker man.

His sister, whose business instincts were much too strong to permit her wrapping up such a “talent” as a freehold house in the napkin of unfruitful occupation, looked round to see how she could best turn it to account.  Accident threw in her way a girl of large fortune with no relations, whose guardians, thankful to find a respectable home for her, readily agreed to pay Miss Payne handsomely for taking charge of the orphan.  Her first protegee married well, under her auspices, and from henceforth her house was rarely empty.  Sometimes she accepted a roving commission and travelled with her charge, meanwhile letting her house in town, so making a double profit.  It was on one of these expeditions that she was introduced to Mrs. and Miss Liddell.  There was an air of sincerity and common-sense about the composed elderly gentlewoman which rather attracted the former, and, when they met again in Paris, Miss Payne came to Katie in her trouble and proved a brave and capable nurse; nor was she unsympathetic, though far from effusive.  So, finding that Miss Payne’s last young lady had left her, Katherine, with the approval of Mr. Newton, proposed to become her inmate for a year—­an arrangement entirely in accordance with Miss Payne’s wishes.