“Now, Katherine, here you are on your own footing at last.”
“Am I? It doesn’t feel like a very solid footing,” said Katherine with a faint laugh.
“I never thought,” said Mrs. Shanks, “that Stella would stay.”
“It is I that have been telling you all the time, Jane Shanks, that she would not stay. Why should she stay among all the people who know exactly how she’s got it and everything about it? And the shameful behaviour——”
“Now,” said Katherine, “there must not be a word against Stella. Don’t you know Stella is Stella, whatever happens? And there is no shameful behaviour. If she had tried to force half her fortune upon me, do you think I should have taken it? You know better than that, whatever you say.”
“Look here—this is what I call shameful behaviour,” cried Miss Mildmay, with a wave of her hand.
The gilded drawing-room with all its finery was turned upside down, the curiosities carried off—some of them to be sold, some of them, that met with Stella’s approval, to Somers. The screen with which Katherine had once made a corner for herself in the big room lay on the floor half covered with sheets of paper, being packed; a number of the pictures had been taken from the walls. The room, which required to be very well kept and cared for to have its due effect, was squalid and miserable, like a beggar attired in robes of faded finery. Katherine had not observed the havoc that had been wrought. She looked round, unconsciously following the movement of Miss Mildmay’s hand, and this sudden shock did what nothing had done yet. It was sudden and unlooked for, and struck like a blow. She fell into a sudden outburst of tears.
“This is what I call shameful behaviour,” Miss Mildmay said again, “and Katherine, my poor child, I cannot bear, for one, that you should be called on to live in the middle of this for a single day.”
“Oh, what does it matter?” cried Katherine, with a laugh that was half hysterical, through her tears. “Why should it be kept up when, perhaps, they are not coming back to it? And why shouldn’t they get the advantage of things which are pretty things and are their own? I might have thought that screen was mine—for I had grown fond of it—and carried it away with my things, which clearly I should have had no right to do, had not Stella seen to it. Stella, you know, is a very clever girl—she always was, but more than ever,” she said, the laugh getting the mastery. It certainly was very quick, very smart of Lady Somers to take the first step, which Katherine certainly never would have had decision enough to do.
“You ought to be up with her in another way,” said Miss Mildmay. “Katherine, there’s a very important affair, we all know, waiting for you to decide.”