Thus Kate had grown up to the verge of womanhood with all her affections buried in her bosom. That dark heart was like a cellar stored with flower bulbs and roots. They are not dead, they send forth bleached and sickly shoots without vigour and incapable of bloom. Hers was a tender, craving nature, one that hungered for love; and as she received none, wherever she turned, to whomsoever she looked, she had become self-contained, reserved, and silent. Her aunt thought her sullen and obstinate. As already related, Mrs. Pepperill had not been always childless. She had possessed a daughter, Wilmot, who had been the joy and pride of her heart. Wilmot had been a bright, merry girl, with fair hair and forget-me-not blue eyes, and cheeks in which the lily was commingled with the rose. Wilmot was a born coax and coquette; she cajoled her mother to give her what she desired, and she flattered her father into humouring her caprices. Naturally, the reserved, pale Kate was thrown into shadow by the forward, glowing Wilmot; and the parents daily contrasted their own child with that of the brother, and always to the disadvantage of the latter. Wilmot had a mischievous spirit, and delighted in teasing and tyrannising over her cousin. Malevolent she was not, but inconsiderate; she was spoiled, and, as a spoiled child, capricious and domineering. She liked--in her fashion, loved--Kate, as she liked and loved a plaything, that she might trifle with and knock about; not as a playfellow, to be considered and conciliated. Association with Wilmot hardly in any degree brightened the existence of Kate; it rather served to cloud it. Petty wrongs, continuous setting back, repeated slights, wounded and crushed a naturally expansive and susceptible nature. Kate hardly ventured to appeal to her father or to her aunt against her cousin, even when that cousin’s treatment was most unjust and insupportable; the aunt naturally sided with her own child, and the father heedlessly laughed at Kate’s troubles as undeserving of consideration. Then, suddenly, Wilmot was attacked by fever, which carried her off in three days. The mother was inconsolable. The light went out of her life with the extinction of the vital spark in the bosom of her child. The death of Wilmot was of no advantage to Kate. She was no longer, indeed, given over to the petty tyranny of her cousin, but she was left exposed to a hardened and embittered aunt, who resented on her the loss of her own child. Into the void heart of Zerah, Kate had no chance of finding access; that void was filled with discontent, verjuice, and acrimony. An unreasonable anger against the child who was not wanted and yet remained, in place of the child who was the apple of her eye, and was taken from her, made itself felt in a thousand ways.