Kate looked at the doctor with an inquiring glance, and he gave her a little confidential nod. The eyes of the young girl and the old man laughed and communicated while the two foolish parents were making their mutual confessions. “Is that my John she is speaking of?” asked Kate’s eyes; and the doctor replied merrily, delighted with his observing patient. To be sure there had been a grave enough moment on the previous day, when these two lives first crossed each other; but this was how the idea of him was formally introduced to Kate Crediton’s mind. It was a foolish, flighty, light, little mind, thinking of nothing but fun and nonsense. Yet even now it did cross the doctor’s mind, with a momentary compunction, that the business might turn out serious enough for poor John. CHAPTER II. It was nearly a week before Kate was permitted to leave her bed, and during that time she had learned a great deal about the economy of Fanshawe Regis. She lay among the pillows every day a little higher, with her natural colour coming back, looking more and more like the Greuze, and listened to all the domestic revelations that flowed from Mrs Mitford’s lips. The kind woman was pleased with so lively a listener, and thus there gradually unrolled itself before Kate a moving panorama of another existence, which the girl, perhaps, had not sufficient imagination or sympathy to enter fully into, but which interested her much in bits, and amused her, and to which she lent a very willing ear. Sometimes the door of the room would be opened, and Kate would hear the footsteps in the house of which she was now a recognised inmate, but which she knew nothing of. There was one solemn step that creaked and went slowly, gravely, up and down stairs, as if life were a weighty ceremonial to be accomplished very seriously, which was evidently the step of Dr Mitford, the Rector of Fanshawe Regis, and rural dean; and there was a lighter springy masculine foot, which came to the very door sometimes with flowers and letters and books for the invalid, and which Kate did not need to be told was “my John.” In the languor of her illness, and in the absence of other objects of interest, this step became quite important to Kate. She was not, we are obliged to confess, by any means a very good young woman. She was a spoiled child, and she had been born a flirt, which could scarcely be said to be her fault. From three years old to nineteen, which was her present age, it had been the occupation of her existence to prey upon mankind. Whether it was sugar-plums she played for or hearts had not mattered very much to her. She had put forth her wiles, her smiles, her thousand little fascinations, with a spontaneous, almost unconscious, instinct. It was necessary to her to be pleasing somebody--to be first in some one’s regard, whoever that some one might be. Before she had been half a day under Mrs Mitford’s care, that good soul was her slave;