But that day, after Aunt Jane had showed her the Carter leader in the paper, Kate went to her room, and somehow her thoughts went back to Henry Austin. She tried to analyze why she had ever got engaged to him. As far as she could define it, a sort of empty space, a partial vacuum, had come into her life, and Austin appeared, and in a tentative way seemed to fill it. Now that he was gone, the vacuum returned. It did not exactly ache, but it caused a vague discomfort that annoyed her, and when she demanded a cure, something within her kept repeating, "Carter, Carter, Carter!" She resented this clamor. She told herself that she was a strong woman. She refused to have her hand forced. She declined to allow an ex-employe of her own to be forced into her life as its only complement. And still that inner something, with irritating persistency, kept repeating, "Carter, Carter," and then got unpleasantly familiar, and began to murmur: "George." She stood it for an hour, stood for that time persistent, inward voices urging her, with never a falter, to one narrow course, and then she got up from her great cushioned chair and went to an old Sheraton bureau. Only one narrow drawer in it was locked, and she carried the key of that amongst the charms on her watch-bangle. She opened the drawer and took from it a photograph. It was only a steamer group, crudely taken by an amateur on a kodak film, a very imperfect thing at its best, and mottled now by the persistent West African mildew. A piece of brown paper with a hole in it was in the same drawer, a mask so cut that it blocked out all of the group except one individual. She fitted this into place and gazed her fill on this very crude presentment of George Carter. [Illustration: She gazed her fill on this very crude presentment of George Carter.] Well, at any rate he was not a handsome man. But there was something about even this indifferent photograph that gave her a great thrill. It touched some inward chord that no other power on earth could set into vibration, and she was discomforted thereby. The gong went for dinner. She ignored it. A servant came presently--she had added to the number of servants at the Prince's Park house and Mrs. Craven accepted the alteration passively--and the servant most respectfully stated that dinner would be served in ten minutes, and was not Miss Kate going up to dress? But Miss Kate was busy and would have a cup of tea and a sandwich. Mrs. Craven below got the news, smiled grimly, and ate an extremely good dinner. She felt a fine satisfaction in having set to work exactly the right influences which would bring that ridiculous Kitty to her senses.