“I am Miss Trant’s creditor,” she said.  “If successful, she will pay me:  if not, why, she will give up the house to me.  I have full faith in her, and I wish her to be perfectly unshackled in the undertaking.  As the owner of a house she will more readily obtain any credit she may need.”

“Which means,” said Mr. Newton, crossly, “that you will have to pay her debts if you ever intend to get possession of the house.”

“Well, I have made up my mind to the risk,” returned Katherine, with smiling determination; “so we will say no more about it.”

The unexpected meeting with Errington haunted Katherine for many a day, and many a night was broken by unpleasant dreams.  She was filled with regret for having so hastily refused his proffered visit.  Yet had he come she would have been uneasy in his presence.  She longed to see him again; she came home from driving or walking each day with aching eyes and dulled heart because she had been disappointed in encountering him.  Yet she dreaded to meet him, and trembled at the idea of speaking to him.  She was dismayed at the restless dissatisfaction of her own mind.  Was she never to find peace? never to know real enjoyment in her ill-gotten fortune?  Why was it that the image of this man was perpetually before her, the sound of his voice in her ears?  Then the answer of her inner consciousness came to overwhelm her with shame and confusion:  “Because you love him with all the strength and fervor of a heart that has never frittered away its force in senseless flirtations or passing fancies.”  This was the climax of misfortune.  To know that the one of all others she most looked up to must, in spite of his kind forbearance, despise her as a cheat.  Surely it was a sufficient punishment for a delicately proud woman to know that she had given her love unasked.  All that remained for her was to hide her deep wounds, that by stifling the new and vivid feelings which troubled her they would die out, and so leave her in a state of monotonous repose.  She would endeavor by all possible means to win forgetfulness.

When Cis came back for the Christmas holidays, therefore, he found his auntie ready to go out with Charlie and himself to circus and pantomime, Polytechnic and wax-works, to his heart’s content.  It was not a brisk frosty Christmas, or she would no doubt have been with them on the ice, and the round of boyish dissipations called forth an oracular sentence from Miss Payne.  “It’s just as well those boys are going back to school, Katherine.  You are more foolish about them than you used to be, and if they staid on you would completely ruin them.”

Just before the holidays were over, Mrs. Ormonde visited London, or rather paused in passing through from the distinguished Christmas gathering to which, to her pride and satisfaction, she had been invited at Lady Mary Vincent’s.  The little boys were indifferently glad to see her, and with the jealousy inherent in a disposition such as hers she was vexed at not being first with her own boys, yet delighted to hand over the care and trouble of them to any one who would undertake it.  These mixed feelings ruffled the bright surface of her self-content, inflated as it was by her increasing social success.