She looked at him, and her look was an answer. He stooped and gravely kissed her. "And you really cared, even then? I wish you had been braver," he said a little sadly. "Ah, but," she said, "I didn't know you then--you must try to forgive me, dear. Think how much there was at stake! Suppose I had lost you!" VII THE AUNT AND THE EDITOR Aunt Kate was the great comfort of Kitty's existence. Always kindly, helpful, sympathetic, no girlish trouble was too slight, no girlish question too difficult for her tender heart--her delicate insight. How different from grim Aunt Eliza, with whom it was Kitty's fate to live. Aunt Eliza was severe, methodical, energetic. In household matters she spared neither herself nor her niece. Kitty could darn and mend and bake and dust and sweep in a way which might have turned the parents of the bluest Girtonian green with envy. She had read a great deal, too--the really solid works that are such a nuisance to get through, and that leave a mark on one's mind like the track of a steamroller. That was Aunt Eliza's doing. Kitty ought to have been grateful--but she wasn't. She didn't want to be improved with solid books. She wanted to write books herself. She did write little tales when her aunt was out on business, which was often, and she dreamed of the day when she should write beautiful books, poems, romances. These Aunt Eliza classed roughly as "stuff and nonsense"; and one day, when she found Kitty reading the _Girls' Very Own Friend_, she tore that harmless little weekly across and across and flung it into the fire. Then she faced Kitty with flushed face and angry eyes. "If I ever catch you bringing such rubbish into the house again, I'll--I'll stop your music lessons." This was a horrible threat. Kitty went twice a week to the Guildhall School of Music. She had no musical talent whatever, but the journey to London and back was her one glimpse of the world's tide that flowed outside the neat, gloomy, ordered house at Streatham. Therefore Kitty was careful that Aunt Eliza should not again "catch her bringing such rubbish into the house." But she went on reading the paper all the same, just as she went on writing her little stories. And presently she got one of her little stories typewritten, and sent it to the _Girls' Very Own Friend_. It was a silly little story--the heroine was _svelte_, I am sorry to say, and had red-gold hair and a soft, _trainante_ voice--and the hero was a "frank-looking young Englishman, with a bronzed face and honest blue eyes." The plot was that with which I firmly believe every career of fiction begins--the girl who throws over her lover because he has jilted her friend. Then she finds out that it was not her lover, but his brother or cousin. We have all written this story in our time, and Kitty wrote it much worse than many, but not nearly so badly as most of us.