She was quite convinced that her uncle was right. The more she turned the whole situation over, the clearer what he had said became to her. The only escape was to accept the money which he was willing to give her--for the honour of the family. But if neither she nor John would take that, there was no alternative but for John to go to work in the ordinary way, and show that he could be steady for at least a year. That seemed a very long time--as long as a year can seem to a girl of nineteen, which is saying much. Katharine had seen such glorious visions for that year, too, that the darkness of the future was a tangible horror now that they were fading away. The memory of a dream can be as vivid as the recollection of a reality. The something which John was to find to do had presented itself to her mind as a sort of idyllic existence somewhere out of the world, in which there should be woods and brooks and breezes, and a convenient town not far away, where things could be got, and a cottage quite unlike other cottages, and a good deal of shooting and fishing and riding, with an amount of responsibility for all these things equal in money to six or seven thousand dollars a year, out of which Katharine was sure that she could save a small fortune in a few years. It had not been quite clear to her why the responsibility was to be worth so much in actual coin of the Republic, but people certainly succeeded very quickly in the West. Besides, she was quite ready to give up all the luxuries and amusements of social existence--much more ready to do so than John Ralston, if she had known the truth.