“Well—I don’t quite know, child. Of course I ought not to, but then if I don’t—” She paused, conscious of vagueness. “If I don’t let you go,” she continued, “there’ll be worse trouble before long. This is an impossible position, we know, and if you went to Washington, I’m sure he’d go down on Sunday and bring you back. It was very clever of you to think of going to uncle Robert’s.”
“I could go to the Crowdies’,” said Katharine, meditatively. “Of course, Hester’s my best friend, but I do hate her husband so—I can’t help it.”
Walter Crowdie was a distinguished young painter, whose pale face and heavy, red mouth were unaccountably repulsive to Katharine, and, in a less degree, to her mother also. Mrs. Crowdie was Hamilton Bright’s sister, and therefore a distant cousin.
“And papa might insist on bringing me back from there, too. There are lots of reasons against it. Besides—Hamilton—”
“What about Hamilton?” asked Mrs. Lauderdale.
“Oh, nothing! Mother—I don’t want to do violent things and make a fuss, and all that, you know—but if you agree, and think it’s sensible, I will go up and ask uncle Robert if I may stay a few days. You can see, yourself, that all this can’t go on much longer.”
In her resentment of her father’s behaviour, she felt quite reconciled with her mother, and Mrs. Lauderdale was glad as she realized the fact. There was an underthought in her mind, too, which was perhaps not altogether so creditable. Though it was only to be for a few days, Katharine was to be away from her. She, was to have a breathing space from the temptation which tormented her. For a little while she should be herself again, not contrasted, at every turn of her daily life, with that terrible bloom which ever outshone the fading flower of her own beauty. That was her dream. If she could but be supremely beautiful still for one short month—that was all she asked—after that, she would submit to time, and give up the pride of life, and never complain again. She would not have acknowledged to herself that this was a motive, for she honestly did her best to fight her sin; but it was there, nevertheless, and influenced her to agree the more readily to Katharine’s absence. It counteracted, indeed, the anxiety she felt about her husband’s view of the case when he should return from his office late in the afternoon; but her instinct told her, also, that he might very probably be a little ashamed of what he had done, and be secretly glad of the solution unexpectedly offered him.
Katharine got ready to go in a few minutes. As she put on her hat and gloves, she glanced two or three times at the bit of red ribbon that lay on her toilet-table. She had taken down the signal from the window on the previous evening, in order to inform John Ralston that she could not come that morning. On the whole, she was glad that she could not see him, for it would be hard to conceal from him what had happened. She would send him a message down town, and he could see her, undisturbed, at their uncle’s house in the afternoon—more freely there than anywhere else, indeed, since Robert Lauderdale was in the secret of the clandestine marriage.
Before she left the house, Mrs. Lauderdale laid her hands upon the girl’s shoulders and looked into her eyes with an anxious expression.
“Katharine, dear,” she said, “don’t ever let yourself think such things as you said yesterday afternoon.”