“Oh, Stella, Stella!” cried Katherine under her breath. She repeated the words when they had gone into their own room. Stella, flushed and excited, had thrown herself upon the stool before the piano and began to play wildly, with jars and crashes of sound. “Oh, Stella, how dared you do such a thing? How dared you barter away your love, for he is your love, for diamonds and frocks? Oh, Stella, you are behaving very, very badly. I am not fond of Charles Somers; but surely, if you care for him at all, he is worth more than that. And how dared you--how dared you sell him--to papa?” But Stella said never a word. She went on playing wild chords and making crashes of dreadful sound, which, to Katherine, who was more or less a musician, were beyond bearing. She seized her sister’s arm after a moment and stopped her almost violently. “Stop that, stop that, and answer me!” she cried. “Don’t you like my music, Kate? It was all out of my own head--what you call improvising. I thought you would like me to go to the piano for comfort. So it is an ease to one’s mind--it lets the steam off,” cried Stella with a last crash, louder and more discordant than the others. Then she abandoned the piano and threw herself down in a chair. “Wasn’t that a funny talk I had with papa? You may tell Charlie, if you like, it will amuse him so. They would all think it the most glorious. I shall tell it to everybody when I am on the----” Here Stella stopped, and gave her sister a half-inquiring, half-malicious look, but found no response in Katherine’s grieved eyes. “I don’t know what you mean, Stella,” she said. “If you mean what papa thinks, it is the most odious, humiliating bargain; if you mean something else, it is--but I can’t say what it is, for I don’t know what you mean. You are going to be a traitor one way or else another, either to Charlie or to papa. I don’t know which is worse, to break that man’s heart (for he is fond of you) by throwing him over at the last moment, or to steal papa’s money and break his heart too.”