“I did not know you were acquainted with Miss Liddell,” she said one evening when she was sitting with her brother, Katherine having retired early, as she often did.  “It is quite a surprise to me.”

“I can hardly say I am acquainted with her; I happened to be of some slight use to her once, and I met her after by accident, when we spoke; that is all.”

“I wonder she did not mention it to me.”

“I imagine she hardly knew my name.”  Miss Payne uttered an inarticulate sound between a h’m and a groan, by which she generally expressed indefinite dissent and disapprobation.  Then she rose and walked to the dwarf bookcase at the end of the room to fetch her tatting.  She was tall and slight.  Following her, you might imagine her young, for her figure was good and her step brisk.  Meeting her face to face, her pale, slightly puckered cheeks, closely compressed lips, keen light eyes, and crisp pepper-and-salt hair—­Cayenne pepper, for it had once been red—­suggested at least twenty or twenty-five additional years as compared with the back view.

Returning to her seat, she began to tat, slowing drawing each knot home with a reflective air.

“That woman is hunting her up,” she exclaimed suddenly, after a few minutes’ silence, during which Bertie looked thoughtfully at the fire—­his quiet face, with its look of unutterable peace, the strongest possible contrast to his sister’s hard, shrewd aspect.

“What woman?” asked, as if recalled from a dream.

“Mrs. Ormonde.  There was a telegram from her this afternoon.  She has been worrying Miss Liddell to go to them ever since she set foot in England; and as that won’t do, she is coming up to-morrow to see what personal persuasion will do.”

“I dare say Mrs. Ormonde is fond of her sister-in-law.  She is too well off to have any mercenary designs.”

“Is that all your experience has taught you?” (contemptuously).  “If there is any truth in hand-writing, that Mrs. Ormonde is a fool.  Her letter after Mrs. Liddell’s death, which Katherine showed me because it touched her, was the production of an effusive idiot.  I don’t trust sentimentalists; they seldom have much honesty or justice.  Katherine Liddell is a little soft too, but she is by no means so asinine as the others I have had.  Wait, however—­wait till some man takes her fancy; that is the divining-rod to show where the springs of folly lie.”

“Miss Liddell is a good deal changed,” returned Bertie, slowly.  “She looks considerably older.  No, that is not the right expression:  I mean she seems more mature than when I saw her before.  What she says is said deliberately; what she does is with the full consciousness of what she is doing; but she looks as if she had suffered.”

“She has,” said Miss Payne, with an air of conviction.  “Her grief for her mother was, is, deep and real.  I don’t believe in floods of tears—­they are a relief.”