“You can’t put the idea out of my head, now that you have put it in, cousin Walter,” said Kate, with blunt gravity. “But I shall not be of age for thirteen months, so I have plenty of time to think about it.”
And she did think about it with a new reticence that proved her to be, after all, her mother’s daughter. Slowly she recognised that she must make her own decision, that she did stand alone. She read her uncle’s letter over again, and saw that it was framed so as not to exclude the possibility of any decision. She was still child enough not to care very much about the position she would sacrifice, “for I might make mamma promise not to go back to Applehurst,” she thought, but the view that came to her most forcibly, perhaps from a sort of unconscious opposition to the pressure of her mother’s feelings, was that by declaring herself the false heiress, she might be doing a wrong to her father’s memory. “It would make people sure he had cheated, and perhaps, after all, he did not,” she thought, and then suddenly there came over her hard struggle for wisdom and sense, a thought so sweet, so absorbing, that all her trouble seemed to melt away in the warmth of it. If Major Clare were her lover, then he would know what was right. If she could tell him—poor Kate’s heart went out with a yearning longing desire, and it never struck her then that in honour, he ought to be told of her doubts if ever in real truth he were her lover. Never—till in some novel that she was reading, the plot turned on such a concealment. “Should I be a ‘villain’ if I didn’t tell him that perhaps I mean to give it up?” she thought. “Dear me, I had no idea how easy it was to be wicked! How he would despise me!”
Poor Katharine had not much notion of that other and Higher Counsel, which her uncle’s letter had advised her to seek. She had been taught to be dutiful and reverent; but it did not occur to her that “saying her prayers” would help her in her present trouble, though as she scrupulously asked in the unaltered language of her childhood to be “made good,” and helped to obey her mother, she found perhaps more guidance than she knew.
And then Major Clare came back, and in the glow and brightness of his increased attention, Kate was too happy to think of anything else, definitely or long. Emberance was wide awake now, and scrupulously careful not to interfere, and as Minnie and Rosa Clare were equally on the alert, opportunities did not lack. To go to the Vicarage and help to cover books for the Lending Library was a piece of parochial usefulness that even Mrs Kingsworth could not forbid to her young ladies, and if Uncle Bob did hang about with his newspaper, till he finally discarded it, and pasted and papered, with a firmness and handiness astonishing to the young ladies, it could only be regarded as good nature to his nieces—nay, between dining-room and drawing-room, mixing paste and getting afternoon tea, if a tête-à-tête could have been avoided, at least it did not seem unnatural.
Not unnatural, only intensely important, more important than anything in the world to Kate, and strangely silencing and embarrassing to the Major, as he looked at the little figure kneeling on the hearth-rug, stroking the Vicarage cat, with the firelight reddening and brightening her hair, and the uncertain light or her uncertain feeling, softening her fresh rosy face.
“Well,” said Major Clare, “I never thought to paste my fingers in Rosa’s service.”
“You paste better than any of us.”
“Masculine superiority?”
“I suppose so,” said the straightforward Kate.
“Do you think it has been a very dull day?” said Major Clare, coming nearer, and leaning his arms on the mantelpiece, “though we have been employed in such a dull occupation?”