At the end of that month Katherine Massarene had ceased for a time her painful self-imposed task and gone down to Bournemouth, where she had taken a house for the autumn and winter; a villa in a pine-wood which looked on to the sea. It was a pretty place but to her mother it seemed a poor nutshell after the spaciousness and splendor of Harrenden House and Vale Royal. The diminished establishment, the comparatively empty stables, the loss of Richemont and his satellites, were at once a relief and an offence to her.
“One would think poor William had been sold up and we was livin’ on my savings,” she said in indignation.
“My dear mother, you could not keep up this place under three thousand a year,” said her daughter.
“And what’s that to us as had millions?” asked her mother.
Katherine thought of the primary plank hut at Kerosene City, but she saw that her mother was in no mood to remember those primitive times.
The Bournemouth residence was really pretty and had a simple elegance in it which was due to a great painter whose whim and pleasure it had been; and it was a fitting retreat for two women in deep mourning. But Margaret Massarene chose to consider it as a mixture of workhouse and prison. Her fretfulness and incessant lamentation made her companionship very trying, for it was the kind of obstinate discontent with which no arguments can struggle with any chance of success. One fine dim balmy morning, when the smell of the sea blended strongly with the scent from the pine-woods, Katherine was alone in the large room which had been the painter’s studio and was now set aside for her own use, reading the still voluminous correspondence from her agents and solicitors. A young footman, who had not the perfect training which Mr. Winter had exacted in his underlings, opened the door and ushered in unannounced a tall fair man, who stood in hesitation on the threshold. “Lord Hurstmanceaux, ma’am,” said the young servant, and shut the door behind the visitor’s back.
Katherine looked up from her heavily-laden writing-table, and was vexed to feel that she changed color.
“My mother and I do not receive——” she said with some embarrassment.
Hurstmanceaux came across the room and stood on the other side of the table.
“You have not drawn the check which I sent to you on Coutts’s,” he said abruptly.