Mr Clare met them as they came up the little irregular street, and the Canon introduced himself and his nieces, on which followed an inspection of the Church; the Vicar was perplexed at finding so little to indicate which young lady was his future Lady of the Manor, till he remarked that Mrs Clare and his daughters were intending to call, when Katharine sparkled up and said eagerly, “Oh, yes, please; I hope they will. When will they come?”
“This niece,” said Canon Kingsworth, “has led so solitary a life that companions are a new pleasure to her; but we think it right that she should make acquaintance with her future home.”
Katharine was intensely eager about this promised visit, which seemed to her like the beginning of her new life, and her sudden springs to the window whenever she fancied that she heard the front door bell, and her constant references to the subject annoyed her mother inexpressibly.
Kate had not long to wait; for the next day brought Mrs Clare and her daughters, pleasant lively people, the two girls quite as desirous of the acquaintance as Miss Kingsworth herself could be, though they expressed it with somewhat more reserve. This rosy-cheeked girl rushing into friendship as if she had been fourteen instead of nineteen was not at all the heiress that they had expected.
Emberance was a very great assistance in all the difficulties of the new life. She made herself agreeable to the various families who came to call, and she kept Kate in order, and instructed her in various small pieces of social etiquette, taught her how to arrange her hair and when it was correct to wear gloves, and tried to induce her to regard the dinner parties to which they were duly invited with something like composure.
The Clares were their only near neighbours, and the only people with whom during the next few weeks the girls became in any degree really intimate, and with whom Kate learnt the joys of girlish companionship. And she did enjoy it with an intensity of delight, a want of proportion in her pleasure that sorely perplexed Mrs Kingsworth, who, on her part, deprived her of what might have been a counterbalancing and sobering influence, in forbidding her to visit among the cottages or to take up any of the parish work to which the Clares might have introduced her, and which she would have taken up quite as eagerly as anything else under their auspices. She flew into the drawing-room one day on her return from a visit to the Vicarage, exclaiming,—
“Mamma! there are two of the dearest old women, a red cloak one of them has, and Mrs Clare has asked me to go and read to them, and she says I may take them tea and sugar. She told me to ask you, but of course you will like me to do this, because no one can say it is not useful and sensible.”
Mrs Kingsworth’s face assumed the intensely grave expression, which it wore when she felt that a hard task was laid upon her. She feared that awkward revelations might be made to Katharine in the course of such visits, and not being able to give her this chief reason for a refusal, she fell back on secondary ones.
“I am sorry to disappoint you, Katie, but I don’t think you have the necessary experience, and you do not know how much self-denial it costs to be regular in such a duty.”
“But I can’t have experience unless I begin. Mrs Clare says they like something young and cheerful.”