"Ah!" said Kate, "how nice. Please open those little windows every one. I suppose you have sworn never to let wholesome air into a room. Thank you: now go and forget every cross word I have said to you—I am out of sorts, and nervous, and irritable. There, run away, my good soul, and light fires in every room; and don't you let a creature come near me, or you and I shall quarrel downright."
Mrs. Hill beat a hasty retreat. Kate locked the door and threw herself backwards on the bed, with such a weary recklessness and abandon, as if she was throwing herself into the sea, to end all her trouble—and burst out crying.
It was one thing to refuse to marry her old sweetheart; it was another to take his property and reduce him to poverty. But here was she doing both, and going to be persuaded to marry Neville, and swell his wealth with the very possessions she had taken from Griffith; and him wounded into the bargain for love of her. It was really too cruel. It was an accumulation of different cruelties. Her bosom revolted: she was agitated, perplexed, irritated, unhappy, and all in a tumult: and, although she had but one fit of crying,—to the naked eye,—yet a person of her own sex would have seen that at one moment she was crying from agitated nerves, at another from worry, and at the next from pity, and then from grief.
In short she had a good long, hearty, multi-form cry; and it relieved her swelling heart so far, that she felt able to go down now, and hide her feelings, one and all, from friend and foe; to do which was, unfortunately, a part of her nature.
She rose and plunged her face into cold water, and then smoothed her hair.
Now, as she stood at the glass, two familiar voices came in through the open window, and arrested her attention directly. It was her father conversing with Griffith Gaunt. Kate pricked up her quick ears and listened, with her back hair in her hand. She caught the subject of their talk, only now and then she missed a word or two.
Mr. Peyton was speaking rather kindly to Griffith, and telling him he was as sorry for his disappointment as any father could be whose daughter had just come into a fortune. But then he went on and rather spoiled this by asking Griffith bluntly what on earth had ever made him think Mr. Charlton intended to leave him Bolton and Hernshaw.
Griffith replied, with manifest agitation, that Mr. Charlton had repeatedly told him he was to be his heir. "Not," said Griffith, "that he meant to wrong Mistress Kate, neither: poor old man, he always thought she and I should be one."
"Ah! well," said Squire Peyton, coolly, "there is an end of all that now."
At this observation Kate glided to the window, and laid her cheek on the sill to listen more closely.