These had been strange years. Fortunately the dark times that pass over us come only one day at a time, and we are not aware that they are to last for years, or enabled to grasp them and consent that so much of life should be spent in that way. It would no doubt have appalled Katherine, or any other young woman, to face steadily so long a period of trouble and give herself up to live it through, consenting that all the brightness and almost all the interest of existence should drop from her at the moment when life is usually at its fairest. She would have done it all the same, for what else could she do? She could not leave her father to go through all these agonies of ending life by himself, even though she was of so little use to him and he had apparently such small need of natural affection or support. Her place was there under all circumstances, and no inducement would have made her leave it; but when Katherine looked back upon that course of years it appalled her as it had not done when it was in course of passing day by day. She was twenty-three when it began and she was twenty-nine when it came to an end. She had been old for her age at the first, and she was still older for her age in outward appearance, though younger in heart, at the last--younger in heart, for there had been no wear and tear of actual life any more than if she had spent these years in a convent, and older because of the seclusion from society and even the severe self-restraint in the matter of dress, which, however, was not self-restraint so much as submission to necessity, for you cannot do two things with one sum of money, as many a poor housekeeper has to ascertain daily. Dressmakers’ bills for Katherine were not consistent with remittances to Stella, and it was naturally the least important thing that was sacrificed. She had accordingly lost a great deal of her bloom and presented an appearance less fair, less graceful--perhaps less loveable--to the eyes of Dr. Burnet as she rose from the lonely fireside in her black dress, slim and straight, slimmer perhaps and straighter than of old--pale, without either reflection or ornament about her, looking, he thought, five-and-thirty, without any elasticity, prematurely settled down into the rigid outlines of an old maid, when he went into the well-known drawing-room in an October evening to tell her that at last the dread visitor, anticipated yet not believed in for so long, was now certainly at hand.