And thus Katherine’s small diversions were driven back into a still narrower circle. She could not go to the Rectory, where the girls were divided between gratitude to her for not having turned their life upside down, and wrath against her for not having appreciated papa; nor could she go where she was sure to meet him, and to catch his look of offended pride and wounded dignity. It made her way very hard for her to have to think and consider, and even make furtive enquiries whether the Stanleys would be there before going to the mildest tea party. When Mrs. Shanks invited her to meet Miss Mildmay, she was indeed safe. Yet even there Mr. Stanley might come in to pay these ladies a call, or Charlotte appear with her portfolio of drawings, or Evelyn fly in for a moment on her way to the post. She went even to that very mild entertainment with a quiver of anxiety. The great snowstorm was over which had stopped everything, obliterating all the roads, and making the doctor’s dog-cart and the butcher’s and baker’s carts the only vehicles visible about the country--which lay in one great white sheet, the brilliancy of which made the sea look muddy where it came up with a dull colour upon the beach. Everything, indeed, looked dark in comparison with that dazzling cloak of snow, until by miserable human usage the dazzling white changed into that most squalid of all squalid things, the remnant of a snowstorm in England, drabbled by all kinds of droppings, powdered with dust of smoke and coal, churned into the chillest and most dreadful of mud. The island had passed through that horrible phase after a brief delicious ecstasy of skating, from which poor Katherine was shut out by the same reasons already given, but now had emerged green and fresh, though cold, with a sense of thankfulness which the fields seemed to feel, and the birds proclaimed better and more than the best of the human inhabitants could do. The terrace gardens of Mrs. Shanks and Miss Mildmay shone with this refreshed and brightened greenness, and the prospect from under the verandah of their little houses was restored to its natural colour. The sea became once more the highest light in the landscape, the further cliffs were brown, the trees showed a faint bloom of pushing buds and rising sap, and glowed in the light of the afternoon sun near its setting. Mrs. Shanks’ little drawing room was a good deal darkened by its little verandah, but when the western sun shone in, as it was doing, the shade of the little green roof was an advantage even in winter; and it was so mild after the snow that the window was open, and a thrush in a neighbouring shrubbery had begun to perform a solo among the bushes, exactly, as Mrs. Shanks said, like a fine singer invited for the entertainment of the guests.