Nurse was less curious than usual—the subject was one that could only give her pain and grief, so she contented herself with Kate's general assurance that all was satisfactorily settled. The Colonel, notwithstanding all his consideration for his loving, self-forgetting child, could not suppress a groan, when he heard all the particulars she thought fit to give.
"Ah, dear Kate! what costs us so dear, brings but little into our exchequer."
"But I shall get more pupils, you know, and then—"
"Well, God's will be done!"
The lessons at Brompton began the next day; and Kate was surprised to find how rapidly the time flew in the endeavour to convey her own knowledge to her pupils; then the walk back, accompanied by Cormac, who lay outside the hall door, like a chiselled effigy of watchfulness, all the time the lesson lasted, was charming. The welcome from nurse and grandpapa! how grateful the task to work for them. "All I ask of Thee, oh Mighty Parent! is abundance of work!" she often murmured, almost aloud.
Thus cheered, she wrote in a strain of unwonted gaiety to Winter, promising him an account of Mrs. Storey's soirée, at which nurse was determined her darling should appear in most recherché costume; but, to her dismay, the object of all this care, refused to appear in anything but "a demi-toilette."
"An' why won't ye show yer illigant white neck, an' arums, just to let them see what we've got in ould Ireland?"
"You see, it will be a small party, nurse; and, at all events, I would rather look too little, than too much, dressed; besides, it is of no consequence; yet, that is not quite true," she added, with a frank smile, "I should not like to look frightful."
So she had her own way, and wore the style of dress she preferred. Nurse produced a very handsome bouquet, just at the critical moment when the toilette was "un fait accompli," and Kate was thinking how unfinished her costume looked without what had hitherto been, with her, an invariable accompaniment.