But Catherine only said in her small voice, as politely as ever, ‘Indeed it might,’--and wondered to herself how many more Sundays there were in Lent. Not many, she thought; Easter must be quite close now; Stephen had been in London for what seemed to her innumerable week-ends, and Lent, she knew, only contained six of them. Yet even if there were only one more, the picture of Stephen in her bed.... Mrs. Colquhoun now saw that only a direct question would extract from Catherine what she wanted to know, and getting up with her customary briskness--she was well on the way to seventy, but yet was brisk--remarked that she really must be going; and having bent over Virginia and kissed her--‘No, no, don’t dream of moving, my dear child,’ she said--she approached Catherine, who had got out of her chair, and held out her hand. ‘Shall I see you again, dear Mrs. Cumfrit?’ she asked. And Catherine, instead of, as Mrs. Colquhoun had trusted she would, saying, ‘I’m afraid not--I go home to-morrow early,’ only said warmly, ‘Indeed I hope so.’ Which left Mrs. Colquhoun where it found her. XII Mr. Lambton came to supper. He was the curate; and, during these Lenten Sundays of Stephen’s absence, after evening service supped at the Manor. Mrs. Colquhoun, it transpired, supped on these occasions too, otherwise, Virginia pointed out, Mr. Lambton couldn’t have supped, it needing two women to make one man proper. She didn’t put it quite like this, but that is how it arrived in Catherine’s mind. On this evening Mrs. Colquhoun didn’t sup because Catherine’s presence made hers unnecessary; and by absenting herself when she needn’t have, and thus leaving Catherine to enjoy her daughter’s society untrammelled, gave her colleague in the office of mother-in-law a lesson in tact which she hoped, as she ate her solitary meal at home and didn’t like it, for she hadn’t been expected back to supper and there was nothing really worth eating, would not be lost. Mr. Lambton was young, and kind, and full of reverences. He reverenced his Rector and his Rector’s wife and his Rector’s mother and his Rector’s mother-in-law; he was ready to reverence their man-servants and their maid-servants and anything that was theirs as well. He was not long from Cambridge, and this was his first curacy. On the quiet surface of the evening he hardly caused an extra ripple. He was attentive to both ladies, offering them beet-root salad and bringing them footstools, and afterwards in the drawing-room he brought them more footstools. Catherine kept on forgetting he was there; and Mr. Lambton, having established his Rector’s wife’s mother in an easy-chair out of a draught, and inquired if she didn’t wish for a shawl--having discharged, in fact, his duty to the waning generation, forgot in his turn that she was there, and with Virginia discussed the proposed improvements, going with a quiet relish through all the papers Catherine had been taken through that afternoon.