“It is too deep for anything to do me good,” said Kate; but she suffered the handkerchief to be placed on her forehead, and put up with all those mysterious manipulations of the pillow and the hair and the patient which are orthodox in the circumstances. She lay with her eyes closed and the wet kerchief on her forehead, and her hair spread over the pillow, making her face look all the paler in comparison; her pretty mouth drawn down at the corners, her pale lips and closed eyelids, a very image of youthful misery. Her heart was broken, she thought; and oh, how her head ached!
“Did you get your letters, Miss?” said Parsons softly, drawing out her bright hair, and bending over her sympathetically. But Parsons recoiled in another moment, giving the hair a tug in her consternation, as Kate suddenly stood before her, all blazing and glaring like an avenging angel, with one hand grasping her shoulder and the other clenched menacing in her face.
“My letters!—oh, you wicked miserable woman, it is you who have made me so unhappy! My letters! what do you know of them?” cried Kate.
“Lord, Miss!” said Parsons in dismay, backing before her. And then she began to cry. “I thought as you’d rather I brought ’em up-stairs. You weren’t in the drawing-room, nor nowhere to be seen. I meant it for the best,” cried Parsons, backing to the wall with such a terror of the clenched hand as was quite out of proportion to the powers of that little weapon of offence.
“Give them to me,” cried Kate; “draw up the blinds—make haste and throw this wet thing away. My letters, my letters!—oh, if you only knew what harm you have done! Give them to me——”
She sat down on the sofa under the window, which, after being veiled so carefully, now poured in upon her all the light of the full sunshiny October day. There was a note from Madeline Winton, a notification about millinery from Camelford, something else equally unimportant, and the letter from John, which she ought to have had three hours ago. She paused as she took it up, and turned to Parsons, who was still fluttering about the room in her alarm: “Go away,” said Kate, solemnly; “you can say I have a headache and am lying down; and, please, don’t come near me any more to-day.”
“Let me come and dress you, Miss, as usual. Oh, goodness gracious me! as if I meant any harm.”
“You need not stop to cry,” said Kate, severely; “but go away. You wicked woman! I owe all my trouble to you.”
And then as soon as she was alone she read John’s letter—the letter he had written in his desolate room before he left Camelford. It went to Kate’s heart. She read it and she cried, and she kissed the insensible paper, and her load seemed lifted off her mind. She had been miserable half an hour ago, and now she was happy. It was such an answer to all her questionings as nothing else could have given. She cried, and the colour came back to her cheek and the light to her eyes. “I am not the bank,” she said to herself, with a return of her old levity. “It is not me he means to give up; he must never, never give up me.” And then she kissed the letter again. She had never done such a thing all her life; but she did it now without stopping to think, and she read over the end of it, “yours, and only yours, whatever may happen,” with a gush of warmth and gladness at her heart. “Dear John! poor John! he is so fond of me. Why is he so fond of me?” she said to herself with sweet tears. And then all at once it struck her as with a great chill that there was more than mere fondness in this letter of John’s. “If you should ever want me.” “This may pass over and be to you as if it had never been.” How could that be? Was not he hers and she his as of old?
Just then there came a knock to the door, and two little notes were handed in to her. Another cold thrill went over her as she saw them. One was from her father, and the other from Fred Huntley. “My dear, I am grieved your head aches,” wrote the first, “but I don’t wonder. Keep quite quiet till five, and then come down to the library and make two men very happy. My pretty Kate! Your fond father,