“Well, stay here for a bit I am going to speak to mamma,” said Kate, leaving her.
She had quite made up her mind. All at once the spur had been given; but as she paused outside her mother’s door, she leant back against the wall with a sudden awful sense of the irrevocable. She was going to burn her ships, going to give her word, and for the first time she was frightened at the sense of what her word could do, not merely worried and puzzled, but awestruck, suddenly conscious of all the importance of her decision. And with a strange self-revelation, suddenly she knew that she did care for Kingsworth, that she should care for it always, that it was in her to love it and to honour it as Emberance never would, that she need not be silly and frivolous and full of her own pleasures, but such as the heiress of Kingsworth should be.
So it was not in childish weary impatience, not even with a sudden rush of impetuous feeling, but with a sense of awe and resolution that she opened her mother’s door and went into her room.
Mrs Kingsworth was writing a note, and Katharine, as she came in and stood behind her recalled the day when she had vehemently entreated for a little pleasure, a little amusement, a little widening in her narrow life—life looked large enough to her eyes now.
“Mamma,” she said, and something in her voice made her mother turn round with—for once—a natural maternal thought,—Was it Walter? “Mamma, I give you my promise, I will give up Kingsworth to Emberance.”
“Katharine!”
“I want to tell you,” said Kate, standing away from her, and speaking fast, “I see myself now, that the arrangement being wrong makes a real difference. I thought, that while we were not quite sure we ought to believe in my father.”
“Kate, I am sure,” said Mrs Kingsworth. “Doubts are only a pretence.”
“I thought,” pursued Katharine, “that—that it didn’t matter to either of us. But it does. Emmy is very unhappy; she is engaged to Mr Mackenzie; and he has no money now, so Aunt Ellen forbids her even to write to him. But if she has Kingsworth it will all come right. So I do see that it is wrong for me to keep Kingsworth. I cannot—now I know she wants to be rich—I mean, now I know that her life is spoilt because she is poor.”
“My dear, dear child!” Mrs Kingsworth took her in her arms and kissed her fondly; but even she felt startled and awestruck. “I was sure that you would wake up to the sense of the wrong,” she said softly.