“I’ve had a dreadful time lately. I’ve imagined anything. I’ve been expecting Phil to run away. Millie said he would—Mother’s been so strange. She hated Phil, but she asked him to Garth, and seemed to want to have him with her. She’s grown so different that I simply haven’t known her lately. And Phil too—it’s had a dreadful effect on him. He seems to have lost all his happiness—he hates Garth and everything in it, but he’s wanted to be near me, and so he’s come. So there we’ve all been.” She paused for a moment, then went on quickly. “Just now—this afternoon—it all came to a climax. Aunt Aggie had found out from Henry about the Russian woman. She lost her temper at tea, and told Mother before us all. Phil has been expecting this to happen for weeks, and had been almost hoping for it, because then he thought that Mother and Father would say that he must give me up, and that then I would refuse to leave him. In that way he’d escape.
“But it seemed”—here Katherine, dropping her voice, spoke more slowly—“that Mother had known all the time. That horrid Mr. Seymour in London had told her. She’d known for months, and had never said anything—Mother, who would have been horrified a year ago. But no—She said nothing. She only told Aunt Aggie that she oughtn’t to make scenes in the drawing-room, and that it wasn’t her business.
“Philip saw then that his last chance was gone, that she meant never to let me go, and that if she must have him as well she’d have him. He’s sure now that I’ll never give Mother up unless she makes me choose between him and her—and so he’s just resigned himself.”
Uncle Tim would have spoken, but she stopped him.
“And there’s more than that. Perhaps it’s foolish of me, but I’ve felt as though that woman—that Russian woman—had been coming nearer and nearer and nearer. There was an evening the other night when I felt that she’d come right inside the house. I went into the hall and listened. That must seem ridiculous to anyone outside the family, but it may be that thinking of anyone continually does bring them—does do something.... At least for me now she’s here, and she’s going to try and take Phil back again. Mother wants her, it’s Mother, perhaps, who has made her come. Mother can make Phil miserable in a thousand ways by reminding him of her, by suggesting, by ...” With a great cry Katherine broke off: “Oh, Mother, Mother, I did love you so!” and bursting into a passion of tears, clung to her uncle as though she were still a little child.
Then how he soothed her! stroking her hair, telling her that he loved her, that he would help her, that he would do anything for her. He held her in his arms, murmuring to her as he had done so many years ago:
“There, Katie, Katie ... it’s all right, it’s all right. Nobody will touch you. It’s all right, it’s all right.”
At last, with a sudden movement, as though she had realised that there was little time to waste, she broke from him and stood up, wiping her eyes with her handkerchief; then, with that strange note of fierceness, so foreign to the old mild Katherine, she said:
“But now I see—I see everything. What Millie said is true—I can’t have it both ways, I’ve got to choose. Mother doesn’t care for anything so much as for beating Philip, for humiliating him, for making him do everything that she says. That other woman too—she’d like to see him humiliated, laughed at—I know that she’s like that, cruel and hard.
“And he’s only got me in all the world. I can beat that other woman only by showing her that I’m stronger than she is. I thought once that it was Phil who would take me and look after me, but now it is I that must look after him.