Katherine was very glad when her friends went away. They would either of them have received her into their own little houses with delight, for a long visit--even with her maid, who, as everybody knows, upsets a little house much more than the mistress. She might have sat for a month at a time in either of the drawing-rooms under the green verandah, and looked out upon the terrace gardens with the sea beyond, and thus have been spared so much expense, a consideration which would have been fully in the minds of her entertainers; but their conversation gave her an entirely new view of the subject. Her little income had seemed to her to mean plenty, even luxury. She had thought of travelling. She had thought (with a little bitterness, yet amusement) of the cottage she would build, a dainty little nest full of pretty things. It had never occurred to her that she would not have money enough for all that, or that poor old Hannah if she accompanied her mistress would have to descend from the pleasant leisure to which she was accustomed. This new idea was not a pleasant one. She tried to cast it away and to think that she would not care, but the suggestion that even such a thing as the little drawing-room, shadowed by the verandah, was above her reach gave her undeniably a shock. It was not a pretty room; in the winter it was dark and damp, the shabby carpet on a level with the leaf-strewn flags of the verandah and the flower borders beyond. She had thought with compassion of the inhabitants trying to be cheerful on a dull wintry day in the corner between the window and the fire. And yet that was too fine--too expensive for her now. Mrs. Shanks had two maids and a boy! and could have the Midge when she liked in partnership with her friend. These glories could not be for Katherine. Then she burst into a laugh of ridicule at herself. Other women of her years in all the villages about were working cheerfully for their husbands and babies, washing the clothes and cooking the meals, busy and happy all day long. Katherine could have done that she felt--but she did not know how she was to vegetate cheerfully upon her five hundred a year. To be sure, as the reader will perceive, who may here be indignant with Katherine, she knew nothing about it, and was not so grateful as she ought to be for what she had in comparison with what she had not. Lady Jane came to see her the same day, and Lady Jane was over-awed altogether by the news. She had a scared look in her face. “I can only hope that Stella will show herself worthy of our confidence and put things right between you at once,” she said; but her face did not express the confidence which she put into words. She asked all about the arrival, and about Katherine’s purpose of meeting her sister at Gravesend. “Shall you bring them all down here?” she said.