A whole week had still to pass before the arrival of the _Aurungzebe_. After such a revolution and catastrophe as had happened, there is always a feeling in the mind that the stupendous change that is about to ensue should come at once. But it is very rare indeed that it does so. There is an inevitable time of waiting, which to some spirits clinging to the old is a reprieve, but to others an intolerable delay. Katherine was one of those to whom the delay was intolerable. She would have liked to get it all over, to deposit the treasure, as it were, at her sister’s feet, and so to get away, she did not know where, and think of it no more. She was not herself, as she now assured herself, so very badly off. The amount of her mother’s fortune was about five hundred a year--quite a tolerable income for a woman alone, with nobody to think of but herself. And as Katherine had not wanted the money, or at least more than a part of it (for Mr. Tredgold had considered it right at all times that a girl with an income of her own should pay for her own dress), a considerable sum had accumulated as savings which would have been of great use to her now, and built for her that cottage to which her father had doomed her, had it not been that almost all of it had been taken during those five years past for Stella, who was always in need, and had devoured the greater part of Katherine’s income besides. She had thus no nest egg, nothing to build the cottage, unless Stella paid her back, which was a probability upon which Katherine did not much reckon. It was curious, even to herself, to find that she instinctively did not reckon on Stella at all. She was even angry with herself for this, and felt that she did not do Stella justice, yet always recurred unconsciously to the idea that there was nothing to look for, nothing to be reckoned on, but her five hundred a year, which surely, she said to herself, would be quite enough. She and old Hannah, from whom she did not wish to separate herself, could live upon that, even with a residue for poor Robert Tredgold, who had returned to his desk in the dreariest disappointment and whose living was at Mr. Sturgeon’s mercy. Stella would not wish to hear of that disreputable relation, and yet perhaps she might be got to provide for him if only to secure that he should never cross her path.