“Oh, uncle,” cried Katharine, flying at him and throwing her arms round his neck, “to go away, to see a new place! Dear, dear uncle, thank you, thank you.”
“Wait a bit, my child, it is not all sunshine. There are some very sad circumstances in our family history which make Kingsworth a mournful place to your mother and to me. Your inheritance is the result of events not only sorrowful but such as we cannot look back on without a feeling of shame. When you go there, there will be something for you to retrieve.”
Katharine looked grave, but with the dutiful solemnity of a child, inwardly every pulse was dancing, and when her uncle left her she stood for a minute, then with a spring and a cry that she could hardly repress, went dancing down the garden-path, clapping her hands together. Canon Kingsworth thought that he could understand her mother’s dissatisfaction.
Chapter Six.
The Other Party.
At the garden-gate of a pretty little house in one of the suburbs of Fanchester, on a sunny evening a few days after Canon Kingsworth’s visit to Applehurst, stood the disinherited heiress, Emberance Kingsworth. Unlike Katharine, she was fully instructed in her rights and in her wrongs; so fully that they were an old story to her, and had lost much of their interest. For life was pleasant enough, pleasanter since her mother and aunts had left off school-keeping; for Emberance did not like teaching, and preferred the various interests of domestic life.
She was very pretty, tall and lithe, with fair fresh colouring, and abundant light-brown hair, well-opened eyes of deep grey, and a certain air of candour and simplicity, serene and single-hearted.
She stood looking down the long suburban road, with its edge of lime trees, its little villas with fanciful gates, breaking the shrubberies of mountain-ash and acacia, lilac and hawthorn, that fronted the road. She made a pretty picture, with the flickering shadows of an acacia tree on her white dress and straw hat, and looked less like an injured heiress brooding over her wrongs, than a happy girl watching wistfully for a possible meeting.