The next day Miss Payne escorted her suddenly increased party to their marine retreat, returning the following afternoon to attend to the details of letting her house, for which she had had a good offer.

Then came a breathing space of welcome repose to Katherine.  The interest—­nay, the trouble—­of the children drew her out of herself, and dwarfed the past with the more urgent demands of the present.  Cliff Cottage was a pretty, pleasant abode.  The living rooms, which were of a good size, two of them opening with bay-windows on the pleasure-ground which surrounded the house on three sides, were, with the bedrooms over them, additions to a very small abode.

These Katherine succeeded in making pretty and comfortable.  To wake in the morning and hear the pleasant murmur of the waves; to open her window to the soft sweet briny air, and look out on the waters glittering in the early golden light; to listen to the laughter and shrill cries of Cis and Charlie chasing each other in the garden, and feel that they were her charge—­all this contributed to restore her to a healthy state of mind, to strengthen and to cheer her.

Cecil, to his dismay at first, was dispatched every morning to school, where he soon made friends and began to feel at home.  Charlie Katherine taught herself, as he was still delicate.  Then a pony was added to the establishment, and old Francois, ex-courier and factotum, used to take the young gentlemen for long excursions each riding turn about on the quiet, sensible little Shetland.

The pale cheeks which helped to make Charlie so dear to his aunt began to show something of a healthy color before the end of May, and Katherine sometimes laughed to find herself boasting of Cecil’s parts and progress to Miss Payne.  But the metamorphosis wrought by the young magicians in this important personage was the most remarkable of the effects they produced.  Had Miss Liddell been less pleasant and profitable, it is doubtful if Miss Payne would have consented to allow children—­boys—­to desecrate the precincts of her spotless dwelling; they were in her estimation extremely objectionable.  Katherine was, however, a prime favorite; she had touched Miss Payne as none of her former inmates ever did.

Years of battling with the world had coated her heart with a tolerably hard husk; but there was a heart beneath the stony sheath, and by some occult sympathy Katherine had pierced to the hidden fount of feeling, and her chaperon found there was more flavor and warmth in life than she once thought.

When, therefore, she had completed her business in London and was settled at Cliff Cottage, she was surprised to find that the boys did not worry her; nay, when they came racing to meet her in wild delight to show a tangled dripping mass of shells and sea-weed which they had collected in their wading, scrambling wanderings on the shore and among the rocks, she found herself unbending, almost involuntarily, and examining