Katharine was alone and a little thoughtful, though her thoughts were pleasant ones, as she compared her present life with the dulness of Applehurst.
“Kitty is as fresh as if she had spent all her life on a desert island,” one of the Clares had said of her, that morning.
“Well, Applehurst was a desert house if not a desert island,” Kate had replied. “You were all brought up differently. I wonder why—”
Some instinct checked the expression of her wonder on the girl’s lips; but for the first time she realised how unlike her life was to that of other girls, and to feel that the circumstances of it were peculiar.
“Emberance’s father and mine were drowned,” she thought, “so mamma disliked the place for ever afterwards. That might be; but why should she shut me up at Applehurst, and make me so different to other girls? Why does she seem to dislike all my pleasure and to hint that it won’t last. I don’t think she is as kind to me as Mrs Clare is to her daughters; how pleased she was for them to go to the picnic.”
A certain hurt look came across Kate’s bright face as these thoughts passed through her mind.
“When I am twenty-one I shall be able to do as I like,” she thought. “I know that, because Minnie Clare let out that their father said they must not ask me now to give any money to do up the church, as I could not promise it rightly; but I think I shall ask mamma if I may not give them some now.”
A pause in Katharine’s reflections as she watched the gulls dipping into the water and floating upwards again towards the clouds, then—
“I suppose girls who have been all brought up together are much more amusing and know much better what to say than I do. I wonder—I wonder—if Major Clare observed any difference when he walked home with us yesterday from the Vicarage—”
“Why, Kate, are you actually here by yourself?” said Emberance, descending on her from the park above. “That is something unusual.”